The Idea of a Homeland

One way to reduce resistance to remigration is to base it on the idea of a universal right to a homeland.[1] Every individual and every family should have the right to its own home, a refuge from the world where they can live as they see fit. Likewise, every people should have the right to their own homeland, where they can preserve their unique heritage and ways of life.

The idea of a universal right to a homeland has two important implications:

• A homeland is a place where citizens have privileges not enjoyed by other peoples. The purpose of a homeland is to preserve a people and their way of life for all time. Thus they must be demographically, politically, and culturally dominant, meaning that their language and culture are normative, and measures are in place to ensure their demographic continuity and dominance. This is ethnic nationalism.

• Even though a homeland privileges one people over others, this is not unfair to others, for they have the right to homelands of their own. In fact, most of them do have homelands.

The right to a homeland is meaningless, of course, if there are no controls on who can live there. This means borders. It also means policies on migration (immigration and emigration) based on the interests of the founding people.

Due to historical contingencies, most white societies are not ethnically homogeneous. But ethnic nationalism does not depend on ethnic homogeneity. An ethnostate is primarily a legal concept establishing a territory and a state dedicated to a particular people and its interests. One can create an ethnostate instantly, simply by adopting a suitable constitution.

But if a homeland is to be both the home of a particular people and democratic, then we must at the very least ensure that the founding people are the majority of the population. Moreover, since in multiparty democracies, even tiny minority groups can determine the outcome of elections, the founding people must be the overwhelming majority to have real political power.

We need to distinguish between long-standing and recently arrived minorities: Swedes in Finland are different, for instance, than Somalis in Finland.

To reduce resistance to ethnic nationalism, we need a sensible policy on minority groups. Long-standing and closely related (i.e., white) minorities can stay as long as they are comfortable living as minorities in a society in which another ethnic group’s language and culture are normative. The basic human rights of such minorities should be respected at all times. They should also enjoy the same basic civil rights as other citizens. There should be no petty and invidious forms of discrimination.

Obviously, such policies can only apply to minority groups that are committed to living peacefully with the majority. It cannot apply to minorities that are actively hostile, involved in separatist or irredentist movements, or act as fifth columns for other states. In such cases, separation would be the proper way forward.

The Scope of Remigration

This brings us to the question of the scope of remigration. Generally speaking, the broader the scope of remigration, the more people will resist it, simply because the bigger and more radical the project, the more intimidating it is to ordinary people.

Nevertheless, I think we should consider the broadest possible scope for remigration. Let’s explore sending them all back. If Europe is to be preserved, millions of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian immigrants must leave, and all their descendants too. In the majority-white colonial nations of the Americas and the Antipodes, some provision should be made for the remnants of indigenous populations, and some territory should be set aside for the descendants of non-white slaves. Yet millions of recent immigrants and their families must still be repatriated.

The ideal should be complete remigration, even though we might have to settle for less due to political compromises.

Beyond that, we might have to propose less than complete remigration—at least at first—in order to reduce resistance. I have found, for instance, that if you propose the idea of maintaining a “supermajority” of Austrians in Austria, Italians in Italy, etc., many people will accept that idea readily.

A supermajority makes sense if people accept the idea that a homeland is morally legitimate for all peoples, especially if they assume that such a homeland will be democratic, for if people can be outvoted in their own homelands, then it isn’t really theirs.

A supermajority must, of course, be cashed out in specific numerical terms to set a benchmark for remigration policies. This number will vary from country to country, depending on the existing demographic breakdown. Obviously, if a country is 95% homogeneous, it would not pursue less homogeneity, only more.

Another factor would be the willingness of the public to accept a certain numerical target. That can, of course, be determined by polling public opinion. As a general rule, it is always easier to convince people to adopt something that has already been tried. Thus, if one wishes to propose a particular majority/minority ratio, one simply needs to find the last year that it already existed.

For instance, the United States was around 90% white in 1965, when we abandoned immigration policies designed to preserve the white majority. If one proposes restoring the white supermajority of 1965, surprisingly many Americans would be amenable to that.[2] But many of the very same people would resist it if one simply proposed the number without providing a historical example of when that percentage existed.

As a general rule in politics, it is best to unify one’s own bloc and split one’s opponents. If a given country has long-standing, closely related minorities, the leaders of these minority political blocs often agitate for multiculturalism, since they think they benefit from the general principle—for instance, the Swedes in Finland or the Quebecois in Canada. It is important, therefore, to reduce their resistance to remigration by flatly stating that it does not apply to them.

Remigration should focus entirely on recent arrivals. “Recent” basically meaning: after World War II. That alone is an immense task. Thus we should not increase our burdens and multiply our opponents with more sweeping remigration proposals.

Is Remigration Moral?

This breaks down into two questions:

• Is remigration moral as a goal?

• Can remigration be done in a moral manner?

Remigration is a moral goal because every people has a right to its own homeland. Whites are losing their homelands to migration. Therefore, remigration is necessary to restore white homelands.

Beyond that, under the present system, whites will become extinct in all our homelands. The only real solution is the creation or restoration of homelands for our peoples. Therefore, remigration is simply a matter of self-defense in the face of a mortal threat. Since we recognize the moral right to self-defense, particularly by a people facing genocide, remigration is a moral goal.

Can this goal be accomplished in a moral manner? The simple answer is: yes, we can remigrate millions of people while respecting their basic human rights.

Can We Be Comfortable with Remigration?

Sadly, providing an ironclad moral argument for remigration won’t be enough for a lot of people. Modern man puts comfort ahead of morality, and one of the most important forms of comfort is feeling good about oneself, which is not quite the same thing as having a good character or a clean conscience. To lower resistance to remigration, we must make people feel comfortable with it.

Can we “live with” remigration? The simple answer is that, as a race, we can’t live without it.

Unfortunately, most people don’t think about the distant future. Thus their support for remigration hinges on more proximate considerations. They worry that it will interrupt their routines, comfort, and peace of mind.

Mass Migration Is Already Part of Daily Life

To persuade our people that remigration can become part of ordinary life, we should first remind them that it already is. People are forced to move all the time for educational and economic reasons. We move to study. We move for jobs. Once we have jobs, our employers can move us. If we lose a job, we may have to travel to find a new one. Rising costs of housing can force us to move. And so forth.

Yet we sleep quite well at night knowing that millions of people are forced to move for economic reasons. So we can learn to live with forcing people to move for a much higher purpose: the creation of a better world in which all peoples have their own homelands.

Moreover, since most people are comfortable with a system in which people are forced to move for economic purposes, we can make those moves work for remigration. The next time a migrant family needs to move for economic reasons, we will just make sure that they move outside our homelands. This would be particularly easy if they work for multinational corporations, which would cooperate because they wish to continue doing business in our homelands.

Beyond that, our people are already living with moving for racial and ethnic reasons. It’s just that we are the victims rather than the beneficiaries. For generations now, our people have been subjected to mass ethnic cleansing in our homelands. Countless people have changed homes, neighborhoods, jobs, schools, and cities countless times due to mass migration. But despite the enormous human and financial costs of this ethnic cleansing, we have been “living with it” quite well. People seem scarcely aware of it. It hardly intrudes into public discussion, much less political action.

If our people have been living for decades with slow ethnic displacement, then I think we can live with imposing the same conditions on the migrants who are displacing us. I think the migrants can live with it too.

Under the present system, we have no future in our own homelands. To restore our homelands, we must create a system in which the migrants have no future among us due to remigration. With each passing year, migrant populations can be reduced until the last of them have returned home. And if whites can “live with” a system in which we have no future at all, then surely migrants can live with a system in which they have a future in their own homelands.

We Must Look Out for Our Own First

One objection to remigration is that the migrants will only have bleak futures in their homelands. Notice, however, that this objection quietly discards one of the main tenets of diversity advocates, namely that migrants enrich our societies. For if migrants enrich our societies, why would they not enrich their own societies as well? In truth, migrants come to our societies because we enrich them. We provide them with better lives than they can enjoy in their homelands.

But it is also true that some migrants are superior in education, ambition, and agency to the people they leave behind. They may send money home, but their departure removes something far more important: human capital. Thus non-white societies will never be able to provide their citizens decent futures as long as some of their best people can leave to colonize our countries. Non-white lands will only “develop,” to whatever extent possible, once white countries stop skimming off some of their best people.

Every time we fly, we are told that in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will fall from the compartment above. We are always told to put on our mask first, before trying to help others. If we lose consciousness and die, we can’t prevent others from suffering the same fate. That’s nationalism in a nutshell: you must save yourself—or your people—before you can help others.

Because our nations are facing extinction, our first obligation is to ourselves. So, although we wish other peoples well, there’s nothing we can do to help them if we perish. We must save ourselves first.

White countries are rich and powerful. We can do a lot to help non-whites. But we can’t really give them a sense of belonging. Thus if you wish to help non-whites, it is best to help them in their homelands, where they already feel at home and where our money will go a lot farther.

Remigration Can Be Done Slowly

In “The Slow Cleanse,” I argued that one way to make people comfortable with remigration is to do it slowly. After all, white demographic decline has unfolded over generations.

Anti-white demographic trends include lower birthrates, collapsing families, miscegenation, non-white immigration, non-white penetration of white living spaces, etc. These trends were set in motion by political decisions or political negligence, then sustained over time the same way.

The long-term result of these trends is white extinction. But these trends have unfolded so slowly that very few of us have noticed, much less fought back, and those who have noticed have found it difficult to convince people that anything bad is happening.

When we regain control over our homelands, we need to set positive demographic trends in motion and sustain them. Time will take care of the rest. In the short run, we need to raise our birthrates. But we will never win by out-breeding the other races until the planet is “standing room only.” The problem is not too few of us, but too many of them in our homelands. We have been declining for generations. Thus we can take a few decades to set things right.

One of the most common arguments for complacency in the face of demographic decline is that the disaster will happen long after we are dead. Even if we can make a convincing case that present trends, if continued long enough, will result in white extinction, this will not happen within the lifetimes of anyone alive today.

Of course, whites will slip into minority status in many countries within the lifetimes of people reading me today. Moreover, if we look at smaller units—towns, neighborhoods, and schools—whites are slipping into minority status every single day. There are even areas in formerly white countries where whites have virtually disappeared. But certainly for older generations—the Baby Boomers and above—the worst of what we are facing will happen long after their deaths.

This crass egoism is highly selective, however. Some of the same people who wish to leave white demographic decline for future generations to worry about often support environmentalism, wildlife conservation, historical preservation, and other causes to make the world a better place long after they are dead. If you care about these things, you should care about preserving white people, the principal race that cares about the future.

But whenever we cannot change this attitude, we can make it work for us. If some people will not lift a finger to stop white extinction because it will only happen after their deaths, then they shouldn’t object to our plans for remigration, because it too will unfold slowly over decades and only reach fulfillment well after they are dead.

Of course, things have gotten a lot worse in the years since I first argued for gradualism. Thus there is a greater sense of urgency, and more people seem willing to countenance fast-paced, large-scale remigration. For instance, Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain has floated the proposal to remove between 1.5 and 2 million recent migrants in under three years.[3] This is encouraging. The quicker the better.

But it is important to bear in mind that, if politically necessary, a slower process of remigration could still be effective.

Notes

[1] Greg Johnson, “Havens in a Heartless World,” Loving Our Own (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2025).

[2] I propose the idea of “90% White Nationalism” in “The Uppity White Folks’ Manifesto,” in White Identity Politics (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020).

[3] Harrison Pitt and Rupert Lowe, Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, online: https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/pp_mass_deportations_legitimacy_legality_and_logistics

China’s “Century of Humiliation” began in 1839 with the First Opium War. The Qing Dynasty was in decline, and foreign powers began stealing territories and extorting trade concessions through wars and military expeditions. It was a long century that only really ended in 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

But even then, there was unfinished business: Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Macau and Hong Kong have now been returned to China. But Taiwan remains unredeemed. Indeed, Taiwan exists to deny victory to the People’s Republic. To this day, Taiwan claims to be the real China, asserting sovereignty over the rest of China under the protective umbrella of the United States.

It is clearly a sore spot for Beijing. Until the Taiwan Question is settled, the rise of the People’s Republic didn’t really end the Century of Humiliation.

We are told that we must risk war over Taiwan because they make chips for AI. We’re in an “AI race.” Just as we are in a “rare earth minerals” race.

I am skeptical of these arguments. If we were in an “existential” race with China over AI, we would simply move the factories out of China’s reach, like Stalin moved whole industries behind the Urals. But then I remember: history is a long record of leaders facing existential threats and doing nothing.

When I hear that “we” need to acquire territories or risk war over resources and technologies, I cynically wonder who this “we” is. We the people always end up paying for stuff. Whenever we hear “geopolitics” invoked, that’s a sign that we are going to pay twice: first in blood, then in money.

Why pay in blood? Is it simply because politically-connected oligarchs don’t want to compete for contracts, so they bribe politicians to deliver them?

All this, of course, was hovering in the background when Donald Trump and a planeload of billionaires landed in Beijing for a summit.

First of all, taking Elon Musk to China smacks of taking a knife to a gunfight. There are issues of sovereignty and identity at stake here that cannot be addressed by dangling business deals. Trump should have learned that already with the miserable failure of his merchant envoys Witkoff and Kushner to end the Ukraine War.

But Trump can’t learn that. He’s an old man. His powers are declining. So he increasingly defaults to what he knows best: selling steaks, selling wars, selling himself. He’s a merchant. All he ever thinks about is money.

Second, Trump never should have made this trip to begin with, because he threw away a lot of the cards he planned to play in Beijing by starting—and losing—a war with Iran. Trump, however, is simply in denial. He is prolonging the war—and thus increasing the negative consequences—apparently hoping for a miracle so that he does not have to admit defeat.

So of course he did not reschedule the China summit. That would be admitting defeat. In fact, there is some speculation that he was hoping to get China’s help in extricating himself from the Iran mess. He also probably hoped for a bump in the polls. Because that’s what he’s been reduced to: grasping at straws, juicing the stock market and opinion polls with lies and stunts.

Naturally, Trump is claiming great things from this summit. But they are all pie in the sky. For instance, China has promised to buy jets from Boeing. But first, it isn’t the job of the President of the United States to be pitching Boeing jets to Communist dictators. Second, it may never happen.

Let’s talk about what actually happened. Trump’s Beijing summit looks to me like the first 36 hours of America’s Century of Humiliation. We saw Donald Trump buttering up Xi Jinping, praising him as a great leader. Trump does this with Putin and Kim as well. Contrast that with the insults he delivers to America’s allies. This is standard operating procedure for a narcissist. He takes his friends for granted while chasing the approval of his enemies.

Xi did not repay Trump’s flattery in kind. Instead, he spoke the truth. He came right out and said that the United States is a declining power. Trump, of course, deftly pivoted, saying that it applied to Joe Biden’s America, not to Trump’s.

In truth, America has been a declining power long before the vegetable Biden’s presidency. Biden was just a symptom of decline. But Donald Trump has dramatically accelerated it.

I will leave it to future historians to debate the causes and turning points in the decline and fall of the American empire. As Gibbon showed, there’s a lot of decline in an empire. It will probably be declining long after I am dead.

But the Iran War feels like a turning point.

America lost the Iran War on day one, because there was no way that the United States could emerge from this war more powerful than when it went in. I take some grim satisfaction that arch neocon Robert Kagan has declared the obvious: that Trump has been checkmated by Iran.

America’s loss was not contingent on what happened to Iran. Sometimes both sides in a war lose. Iran could have been destroyed utterly. Iran may still be destroyed utterly. But that does not alter the fact that the United States lost more than it gained, because America’s status as World Cop depends largely on bluff, and Iran called it.

Iran demonstrated that the US could not protect its Gulf dependencies. That protection, moreover, was a quid pro quo for the petrodollar system, which is the key to keeping the globe’s biggest debtor government solvent. That system is now unraveling.

The Gulf monarchies are turning to countries like Ukraine to help secure themselves against Iran. Cargoes are now being priced in other currencies than dollars. The United States is now making huge loans to the cash-strapped United Arab Emirates to forestall them selling off US Treasury bonds at a discount. The US Treasury has begun to raise interest rates on new bonds, which means that the US will be paying more to creditors and less to clients to keep the whole system afloat.

The war is now in its eleventh week. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Indeed, the United States is now blockading Iranian oil, which the US initially allowed to pass to keep global prices from spiking even higher. The world is facing shortages of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and other chemicals necessary for modern industry.

That means less of everything good: less light, less warmth, less medicine, less food. For the poor countries of the world, that means famine. And that means more of everything bad: more instability, more violence, more refugees flowing into white countries.

All these consequences were perfectly predictable to me, and I’m not an economist, a geopolitical analyst, or a think-tank Mandarin. I just follow the news with my eyes open. Which means that all these consequences were known to Donald Trump, his cabinet, and the Pentagon brass as well.

But the war went ahead anyway, because this war is not about making America stronger. It isn’t about America at all. This war is Israel hoisting America with chains and bleeding it dry to destroy another of its regional enemies.

Just like the Iraq War, the Iran War was premised on lies about weapons of mass destruction and sold as quick and easy because, of course, the Iranians long for “freedom,” so they “want us to bomb them.”

Bush II was not stupid and disloyal enough to attack Iran. Neither was Obama. Neither were Biden’s minders. Only Trump was a big enough fool and traitor. And his cabinet was too traitorous, too stupid, or too weak to stop him.

I didn’t think the Iran War was possible, because I didn’t think Trump and the people around him were this dumb and evil. I was wrong.

Trump has no cards in the Gulf. If he continues to attack Iran, Iran will continue to retaliate against the Gulf states.

Thus far, Iran has induced a global economic crisis with merely restrained, tit-for-tat retaliations. If Trump goes all in, Iran probably has the capacity not just to destroy the entire economy of the Gulf but to render the region uninhabitable by destroying the desalinization plants. That would trigger a global depression, if we are not already in one.

There is no reason to think that the US could cripple Iran’s retaliatory capacity before the complete destruction of the Gulf—and what remains of America’s global credibility as a superpower.

What’s the best possible outcome with Iran? The United States needs to admit defeat and end the war as quickly as possible, for the longer we wait, the worse the consequences for everyone. The Strait of Hormuz will remain under Iran’s control. The world will be forced to accommodate Iran, beginning with the Gulf States. Some crowned heads may have to roll. America’s regional military bases will probably be abandoned. Iran will emerge as the new regional power.

America didn’t just lose power by attacking Iran. Power does not disappear. It simply moves about. In the Gulf, America’s power will go to Iran.

But America has not been weakened in the Gulf alone. The US has lost so much equipment and materiel in the Gulf that it cannot credibly protect Taiwan and South Korea. That’s China’s back yard. Thus China may be the biggest winner of the Iran War, because she did not actually fight.

Trump lies so much now that the world tends to tune him out. But if you really believe that America is in an existential AI race with China, and Taiwan is a key part of that, then you should be very worried about some statements out of Beijing: Trump’s claim that the plan to sell $14 billion in US defense equipment to Taiwan is a “bargaining chip,” the claim that NVIDIA might be permitted to sell sensitive AI-related technology to China, and the sunny declaration that it would be good for more Chinese money and students to flow into America.

Is Trump signaling his willingness to sell out America to China because he wants Chinese help extricating himself from the Iran War, which we are in because Trump sold out America to Israel?

I just don’t see how patriotic Americans will ever get our country back, Elon Musk will ever go to Mars, and Silicon Valley will ever win its AI race as long as Israel always comes first.

Part 1 of 3

I like the term “remigration” because it builds the argument that migration can be reversed into the word itself. If migration can happen, then of course remigration can happen too.

To make the case for remigration, we must defend three theses:

1. Remigration is possible.

2. Remigration is desirable.

3. Remigration is moral.

Remigration Is Possible

Up until 1965, American immigration laws were designed to preserve a white supermajority. When those laws were changed, far-sighted Americans predicted that it would lead to steady white demographic displacement through non-white immigration. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the American establishment’s standard response to such fears was: “It will never happen.” Then, in the 1990s, the message shifted overnight to celebrating white demographic decline as a great victory for diversity and anti-racism. Those who did not welcome such a future were told flatly: “They’re here. There’s nothing that we can do about it.” The common denominator of all three positions—it will never happen, it is good, it can’t be stopped—is: “Do nothing to stop white demographic decline.” That’s because the goal of white demographic decline was the broad consensus of America’s ruling elite, which can only be described as hostile to the interests of white Americans.

These establishment talking points are remarkable for their sheer stupidity. Even more remarkable is how effective they are. Even people who deeply deplored white demographic decline felt that nothing could be done. To some extent, they were correct, because as long as people think nothing can be done, they’re right. So the first step is to change their thinking.

Why can’t migrants just go back? Trains, planes, boats, and automobiles don’t go just one way. The turnstile at the border doesn’t go just one way. Modern technology makes mass migration faster and easier than ever. That’s why we are in this mess to begin with.

If it is possible for them to come here, it is possible for them to go back. Remigration is possible. The only barriers to remigration are man-made. These barriers can be unmade. It is only a matter of will.

The best way to convince people that something is possible is to show them that it has already happened. In the case of mass remigration, it has happened many times:

• In the United States in the 1930s, between 1 and 2 million Mexican migrants were repatriated.

• In the United States in 1954–55, 250,000 Mexicans were remigrated by Operation Wetback.

• After Algeria became independent in 1962, more than 800,000 European settlers were forcibly remigrated.

• After the 1991 Gulf War, more than 200,000 Palestinian guest workers were expelled from Kuwait for siding with Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

• Beginning in 2023, Pakistan embarked upon remigrating up to 3 million Afghans from its territory.

• Beginning in 2025, Iran embarked upon remigrating up to 4 million Afghan refugees and migrants.

Surely white First World countries can do better at remigration than countries like Iran and Pakistan—in numbers, logistics, and respect for basic human rights and niceties.

Intellectually speaking, the defenses of mass non-white migration are made of tissue paper. It is easy to overcome such arguments in private discussions. But the establishment’s real bulwark is censorship: their views persisted as long as they controlled the news and entertainment media. Fortunately, dissidents were early adopters of the internet, and the rise of social media allowed our ideas to spread virally.

One reason we lack the will for remigration is that we have been convinced of two falsehoods: (1) that remigration must be entirely a government program, and (2) that remigration must be entirely coercive.

Both assumptions are false. Most migrants were not summoned to our shores by governments. They came because of economic incentives. If those incentives are reversed, they will leave. The government must, of course, set these changes in motion. But once the incentives have been reversed, employers, hospitals, landlords, and migrants themselves will take care of the rest.

Yes, some migrants will need to be ejected forcefully. Yes, some protesters will commit acts of violence. But these will simply give us an excuse to accelerate the process.

The greatest challenge to remigration is finding a way to square the requirements of our very survival with our people’s sometimes morbidly delicate consciences. But it becomes easier to mobilize our people if fair and reasonable solutions are violently rejected.

We cannot, however, allow our enemies—and, in truth, some of our friends—to convince us that even forcible deportations would entail a dramatic increase in violence, on the scale of a civil war.

First, migrants already cause a disproportionate amount of violence, so removing them would decrease violence in the long run.

Second, what we are proposing is perfectly normal. We are going to change the law, then the police and courts can deal with lawbreakers. Criminals sometimes resist violently, which is why we arm police officers. But the fact that some murderers and rapists resist arrest is not an argument to legalize murder and rape. The same is true of people who resist laws governing migration.

In short, the way to argue for remigration is to demonstrate that remigration is both possible and moral. Since people naturally have both moral and practical objections to violence, it is especially important for remigration proposals to minimize violence, indeed to plausibly promise reduced overall social violence once remigration is completed.

An Excursus on “Optics”

To convince the world that remigration is possible, desirable, and moral, we need to know the best means of persuasion. This is not just a debate about the content of our message but also the form. It is the inevitable debate about “optics.” Please learn from my mistakes.

In 2003, I wrote an essay called “To Cleanse America: A Modest Proposal.”^[1] I published it online, on an obscure dissident site, under a pen name. My thesis was that there’s no question that remigration is possible: migrants can leave the same way they came. We don’t lack technical means, we lack the will. I also offered arguments to lower public resistance on moral and practical grounds.

I shared this essay with a prominent American white advocate. He liked the argument but not the word “cleanse,” which was a reference to the term “ethnic cleansing,” which was coined during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. My preference was to take that bull by the horns. If we are going to be accused of ethnic cleansing anyway, we should be prepared to say, “Yes, but we advocate the orderly, peaceful, and just kind of ethnic cleansing. It works like this . . .”

In 2010, I started the Counter-Currents webzine with a friend. In 2011, I was one of the first people in America to promote the ideas of the Great Replacement and White Genocide, which were coined that year.

In June of 2014, I expanded upon my earlier ideas about remigration to a much larger audience in an essay called “The Slow Cleanse.” I chose the title because I believe that we can lower resistance to remigration not just by adopting non-violent means but also by doing it slowly and unobtrusively.

I was gratified that this article was well-received by many thoughtful European Identitarians. Once again, though, some Americans reproached me for my use of “cleanse” in the title. It was “bad optics.” Again, I rejected this argument, but when a friend said “The Slow Cleanse” sounded like a spa treatment, I decided to change the title to “Restoring White Homelands” when I included the essay in The White Nationalist Manifesto in 2018.[2]

The basic issue of optics is this: we face enormous barriers to saving our race. Thus we should not create additional barriers and heavier burdens with “bad optics.” In the case of the “cleanse” idea: just because our enemies will throw a word with negative connotations at us, that doesn’t mean we have to accept that word ourselves.

I’ve always been impatient with people who put too much emphasis on specific words. We aren’t going to win simply by programming our people to speak in anodyne buzzwords, slogans, and euphemisms, for instance the American idea that we can sidestep the taboos against “racism” and “whiteness” by speaking of ourselves as “European-Americans” instead of “whites.”

The issue is not so much the words as the negative connotations attached to them by our enemies. Ultimately, what we are fighting against is the idea that whites taking our own sides in ethnic conflicts is simply evil. That idea cannot be defeated merely by avoiding certain negative words—principally, “white” and “racist”—like Victorian ninnies.

Ultimately, we will win only when people understand that there is a good kind of “racism,” a good kind of “ethnic cleansing,” a good kind of “nationalism”: namely, those that protect our people while respecting the equal rights of other peoples.

If the battle is about the moral legitimacy of white survival, not particular words, then we should not run away from bad words. Taboos against words like “racism” and “nationalism” are already collapsing, partly because we have refused to run from them.

But, by the same token, we should not run toward bad words either.

Thus, optically speaking, we should present the case for remigration in the freshest and most wholesome terms possible, with the least amount of baggage. Again, we already face an enormous uphill battle. Why must we burden ourselves unnecessarily with the weight of the past? The time for the “transvaluation” of language is after we have won.

Remigration Is Desirable

There should be as many cases for remigration as there are people to hear them. Ideally, we should have cases tailored to every white country, every region, every age group, every educational level . . . everyone.

But the main distinction is between those with high and low time preferences, those who are oriented to the present and those who think long-term.

For those who are focused on the present, we should emphasize present problems and short-term gains. Remigration will raise wages, lower crime, lower rents, reduce traffic, reduce waiting times for public services, and generally make life better for white people of all classes, regions, and countries. In short, we must communicate that remigration is the path to prosperity and security.

For those who think long-term, we have much more compelling arguments. Remigration is imperative, because under the current system, white people have no future.

Every white homeland suffers from below-replacement fertility. Combine that with immigration and sufficient time, and we will become extinct in all of our homelands, replaced by foreigners.[3]

This is not accidental, either. White extinction is the predictable consequence of government policies. Which means that we are being subjected to a slow process of genocide, as defined under international law.[4]

To survive, we must reverse these trends. First, we must replace the people in power. Then we must replace demographic decline with growth, migration with remigration.

Our ultimate goal is to create or restore homelands for all our peoples. That requires separation, which requires moving people, moving borders, or both. This is what I call “White Nationalism.”

Under multiculturalism, white people have no future. The goal of White Nationalism is to give our people a future again, in all our homelands.

The idea of white genocide is shocking, and there is no need to lead with it among “normies.” But I think it is useful to share this argument among the leaders of the remigrationist cause, because nothing focuses the mind better than the prospect of extinction.

Beyond that, we do not benefit from illusions or naïveté about the ultimate cause of the Great Replacement. It is genocide. Which means that we are not simply battling against the mistaken and deluded, the selfish and short-sighted, but also the genocidally evil.

Notes

[1] Greg Johnson, “To Cleanse America: A Modest Proposal,” in Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, second ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016).

[2] Greg Johnson, “Restoring White Homelands,” in The White Nationalist Manifesto (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018).

[3] Greg Johnson, “White Extinction,” in The White Nationalist Manifesto.

[4] Greg Johnson, “White Genocide,” in The White Nationalist Manifesto.

Now for your streaming or downloading pleasure.

Barbara Will
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, & the Vichy Dilemma
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011

Before 2011, I knew precisely five things about Gertrude Stein: she was Jewish; she was a lesbian; and she said that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for tossing the Jews out of Germany. There were also two unimpeachable quotes: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (you can’t argue with logic like that) and “There’s no there there,” referring to Oakland, California.

Gertude Stein was born in 1874 to a wealthy American Jewish businessman. After her father’s death, Gertrude and her brothers Leo and Michael relocated to Paris, where they lived on their inheritances and collected art.

In the summer of 2011, I attended an exhibition called The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which reunited the Steins’ collections. The exhibition featured around 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, including around 40 works by Picasso and 60 by Matisse, as well as works by Cézanne, Picabia, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

The art interested me less than Gertrude’s role as a patroness. From 1904–34, Stein and her longtime partner, Alice B. Toklas, presided over a salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris. Regular fixtures included Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, as well as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and many others.

Stein bought paintings and other artworks, read and commented on manuscripts, led discussions on art and literature (with a fair bit of pontification), and laid the groundwork for friendships and collaborations. She was by all accounts charismatic and enormously generous in offering criticism and encouragement. I was interested in the cultural and metapolitical role of such salons. (Woody Allen depicts the Stein salon in his 2011 movie, Midnight in Paris.)

It wasn’t long before I was looking into Stein’s notorious politics.

An Unlikely Story

Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration is the most complete exploration of Stein’s ultra-reactionary political views. It is an unusually readable academic book which treats controversial ideas with a refreshingly balanced tone.

Yes, Gertrude Stein recommended Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize. She also hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, supported Francisco Franco, and was a passionate admirer of Philippe Pétain. After the establishment of the Vichy government, she wrote pro-Pétain articles for the American press and translated Pétain’s speeches into English, although there was no way to publish them after America’s entry into the Second World War.

So how did Stein and Toklas—both of them American Jewish lesbians—fare during the Vichy regime and the German Occupation? Quite well, it turns out. They sat out the war in relative luxury, their lives, freedom, fortune, and art collection completely intact.

The main reason Stein and Toklas were never troubled during the war was Bernard Faÿ, described as Stein’s “dearest friend” by Toklas (p. xiii). Faÿ and Stein met in 1926, and they remained friends until her death.

Faÿ was a French scholar of American history and the author of influential books George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Louis XVI, and Freemasonry. Faÿ was a homosexual, a Catholic, an anti-Semite, and an ultra-reactionary. He also became a high-ranking Vichy insider and collaborator with the Germans. Faÿ played a prominent role in suppressing French Freemasonry.

After the war, Faÿ was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hard labor for life for collaboration. Although Stein had not seen Faÿ since 1943, they remained friends. Indeed, in 1946, Stein fell ill at Faÿ’s country house and died.

In 1950, Alice B. Toklas sold one or two of Stein’s Picasso drawings then used the money to help Faÿ escape from prison. Faÿ was spirited away to Switzerland, where he found refuge among ultra-reactionary Catholics and aristocrats.

In 1969, Faÿ helped convince Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to start a new seminary in Fribourg for traditional Catholics who rejected the Second Vatican Council. In 1970, Lefevre founded the Society of Saint Pius X, which remains a stronghold of ultra-reactionary Catholics to this day.

Alice B. Toklas converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957, in part due to Faÿ’s urging. After 21 years of loneliness, she died in 1967 at the age of 89, hoping to be reunited with Gertrude in heaven. Bernard Faÿ received a pardon from the French government in 1959. He died in 1978 at the age of 85.

Given all this, it is remarkable that Stein and Toklas are so celebrated by the modern Leftist cultural establishment. I guess that they, like Heidegger, are just too big to cancel.

Stein, of course, was not just a patroness of the arts and letters. She was also a writer, indeed a self-proclaimed genius. Frankly, though, I find her literary experiments unreadable. As with Ezra Pound and Jonathan Bowden, I prefer Stein’s political commentary to her literary work.

Some Puzzles

If Tom Wolfe had tried to sell Stein and Faÿ’s story as a novel, it would have been rejected for being too implausible.

It really is an unlikely story. Don’t homosexuals, Jews, and modern art belong on the Left, not the Right?

Weren’t the Nazis out to exterminate people like Stein and Toklas?

Don’t Jews oppose anti-Semites? Don’t anti-Semites oppose Jews? Then why did Stein hold anti-Semitic views? Why did Toklas help break Faÿ out of prison, where he was being punished, in part, for being a persecutor of Jews? Indeed, why did the anti-Semite Faÿ protect rather than persecute Stein and Toklas?

Stein, moreover, wasn’t just on the Right. She seemed to embrace two incompatible visions of the Right. On the one hand, she was an admirer of George Washington and the other American Founders. She celebrated America as a land of freedom. She condemned Roosevelt and the Communists for being statist. How is that consistent with admiring Hitler, Franco, and Pétain?

A good explanation takes something unlikely and makes it seem plausible, even inevitable. So let’s turn to Unlikely Collaboration.

Some Explanations

First of all, the idea that modern art belongs entirely to the Left is simply false. As Kerry Bolton, Jonathan Bowden, and mainstream scholars cited by Will have documented, many great modernists have been on the Right, even the extreme Right: Knut Hamsun, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gottfried Benn, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline in literature; Salvador Dalí in painting, sculpture, and prints; Wyndam Lewis in literature and painting; and the Italian Futurists in sculpture and the visual arts.

Second, although Will does not deal with the issue at length, Stein, Toklas, and Faÿ obviously did not think there was any contradiction between being homosexual and being on the Right.

Gertrude Stein as Reactionary Nationalist

Stein never hid her reactionary and nationalist convictions.

Stein strongly believed that nations had distinct identities: “every nation has a way of being[,] of being that nation that makes it that nation” (p. 9). For Stein, this “way of being” consisted less of ideas than a concrete way of life, a set of social conventions and practices handed down through traditions. She believed that a nation’s identity—it’s “being,” “essence,” or “bottom nature”—must be defended lest it suffer “real catastrophe” (p. 9). Thus her nationalism is inherently conservative. And, because she felt that it was possible for nations to catastrophically stray from their identity, she also thought it meaningful to turn back toward a nation’s essence, which is a “reactionary” even a revolutionary conservative position.

It seems odd for an avant-garde artist to define herself as a reactionary ultra-conservative. But for Stein, there was no contradiction between “being well ahead of everyone” and being “reactionary” (p. 14). In Paris France, published the day France fell to the Germans in 1940, Stein declared, “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative[,] that is[,] particularly traditional[,] in order to be free” (p. 7).

Like many other reactionary modernists, Stein did not believe that contemporary society was the pinnacle of progress. In fact, she believed that she lived in a time of decline from a more vital culture, to which modern art (as she conceived it) actually represented a return. Thus when Stein praised “the new,” she was not lauding progress. She was lauding the forces of reaction against the fallen society that progress had delivered us to.

Because Stein believed that modern society had fallen into decadence but could return to health, she looked favorably upon fascism, which she saw as a form of revolutionary conservatism.

American art critic James Lord reported that Picasso said, “Gertrude was a real fascist. She always had a weakness for Franco. Imagine, Pétain too. You know she wrote speeches for Pétain. Can you imagine it? An American, a Jewess what’s more” (p. 19).

James Laughlin, the founder of the New Directions publishing house, reported similar sentiments being expressed in a conversation between Stein and Faÿ in 1934:

In her book Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Stein writes about French political life and flatly states: “we liked the fascists” (p. 132)

Like many on the French far Right, Stein saw Germany’s victory over the Third Republic as an opportunity for the French nation and its true guardians to overthrow decadent liberal democracy and return France to a more vital and traditional society.

Double Identity & Double Talk

Gertrude Stein was actually a nationalist of two nations: America, where she was born and raised, and France, where she spent most of her life. Stein was born into America and assimilated its culture as a child. Interestingly, though, Stein’s mother tongue was German. Her parents spoke German exclusively in the home, and Gertrude did not learn English until she was five.

Stein moved to France as an adult. She began in cosmopolitan Paris, but she was increasingly drawn to the most conservative and traditional regions of the French countryside. Although Stein immersed herself in the French language and culture, she inevitably remained an outsider.

American nationalism is very different from French nationalism. Stein saw America much as American conservatives see it today: as an ethnic melting pot held together by a classical liberal creed. America, of course, was more than just a creed for Stein. It was a way of being, a concrete way of life, an ethos. But Stein largely identified that ethos with freedom, individualism, and religious tolerance. French nationalism, by contrast, is rooted in blood and has a much more authoritarian, communitarian, and Catholic ethos.

Stein’s identification with two very different nations helps to explain her penchant for political double talk. Consider her famous remarks on Hitler and the Nobel Peace Prize from Lansing Warren’s “Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics,” New York Times, May 6, 1934:

As Will emphasizes, Stein placed a very high premium on peace and order as conditions of the creative life. Thus her praise of Hitler is not ironic.

But in the very same interview, Stein seems to praise contest, struggle, and activity, as well as to criticize nationalism, borders, and homogeneity, all in the name of the creative life:

What explains this double talk?

It might be a conscious strategy. Stein may have thought that she could not praise Hitler’s anti-Semitism on nationalist grounds to the New York Times without hedging and contradicting herself a bit.

Another explanation is that her double talk arises from her double identity: American by birth, French by choice. When Stein speaks about Europe, in this case Germany, she praises ethnic nationalism and strong boundaries. When she speaks about America, however, she falls back into clichés about the melting pot and American competition and dynamism.

This sort of double talk is not unknown on the American Right to this day. Consider, for instance, people like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, who commonly praise ethnonationalism when they talk about Europe, but when they talk about America, they hew close to an uncontroversial civic nationalism—either from conviction or cunning. Perhaps they wish to lower resistance to their message. Perhaps they want or protect themselves from pushback. I call it “telescopic ethnonationalism.”

It is interesting to note, moreover, that even though Stein is arguing for looser immigration into America, she still affirms the legitimacy of being selective, excluding some groups entirely, and maintaining the “color line.”

Stein’s unstable synthesis of American patriotism and fascist sympathies was not unlike Ezra Pound’s. Pound tried to harmonize the two by stressing the agrarian populism of Jefferson and using C. H. Douglas’ Social Credit economics to bridge the gap between Jefferson and Mussolini.

Did Stein ever try to reconcile her American nationalism and her fascist sympathies? Only in the most superficial ways, for instance, by likening Marshal Pétain to General Washington.

Gertrude Stein & “the Jews”

Will devotes considerable space to pondering the relationship between Stein’s Jewish identity and her far-Right views.

First of all, nothing prevents Jews from holding Right-wing positions based on universalist ideologies or creedal concepts of nationhood, for these do not exclude Jews as a distinct group. Indeed, Jews can even embrace an ethnic form of nationalism, but only if they understand ethnicity as cultural, not racial, and don’t think of Jews as a distinct ethnicity. The only form of the Right that positively excludes Jews is a blood-based, non-Jewish ethnic conception of nationhood. The only form of blood-based ethnic nationalism that would not exclude Jews is, of course, Zionism.

According to Will, Stein was a strong believer that Jews can and should assimilate. She believed that Jews could become American, or French, or German by adopting those cultures. This is clear from her novel The Making of Americans (1903), in which each successive draft more identifiably Jewish names were cut out (p. 21).

Stein didn’t think that Jews were a biologically distinct group. Thus there was no blood barrier to complete Jewish assimilation. Thus she rejected Zionism as a blood-based Jewish ethnonationalism. In a 1920 text, “The Reverie of a Zionist,” Stein writes “Judaism should be a question of religion. . . . Race is disgusting if you don’t love your country” (p. 23).

Stein thought that religious Jews could become assimilated Americans with a different religion. (However, Stein thought that Catholicism was essential to French identity and “represented the only possible future for France” [p. 34].)

Stein, however, rejected both Jewish religion and “racial feeling,” but she still had a sense of Jewish identity that was expressed in her most private correspondence with Toklas, where she used “Jew” and “Hebrew” as terms of affection, along with babytalk (p. 22). It is the vestigial Jewishness of the nursery.

But whether Jews were religious or non-religious, Stein believed that Jewish identity, including “Jewish race feeling,” should not come before being “a true and loyal American” (p. 20). As early as her college years at Radcliffe, “Stein had already understood Jewishness as something encompassed by and necessarily subordinate to a larger sense of belonging—for example with the nation” (p. 20).

In 1907–1908, Stein was struck with what Toklas called a “mad enthusiasm” (p. 16) for Sex and Character (1903) by the Austrian Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger. Stein was deeply influenced by Weininger’s theory of human character types, which held that every psyche is compounded of different blends of the archetypal masculine and feminine. Stein was also impressed by Weininger’s theory of genius, in which she saw herself.

Weininger’s chapter on “Judaism,” argues that the archetypical Jew is feminine, irreligious, lacking in individuality, and lacking a moral sense. Weininger claims that the Jewish psychological archetype is not, however, identical to Jews in a biological sense. Some non-Jews can be spiritually Jewish, just as some Jews can be spiritually non-Jewish.

According to Will, by the 1930s, Stein began referring to “the Jews” as a “discrete and disruptive social entity, often seeming to exclude herself from the category” (p. 24).

Stein came to see Jews as socially disruptive due to her increasing immersion in the French ultra-nationalist Right, which was strongly anti-Semitic. Will sees this as largely the influence of Faÿ. Stein began as Faÿ’s mentor, but in political matters, she increasingly became his student. Will quotes a letter from Stein to Faÿ from the early 1930s saying “and of course I see politics but from one angle[,] which is yours” (p. 69).

Stein regarded “the Jews” as a distinct category from herself and Toklas because Stein did not think one was born Jewish in any important sense. Jews were only problematic because they chose to see themselves as a distinct and hostile race or nation: Zionist Jews, Bolshevik Jews, Left-liberal Jews, etc. By contrast, assimilated Jews with a merely private sense of Jewishness—like Stein and Toklas—were not a problem. Beyond that, from Weininger’s point of view, it was perfectly possible for Stein and Toklas to be spiritually non-Jewish. Thus Stein genuinely did not identify with “the Jews.”

Of course, the fact that Stein and Toklas did not think of themselves as problematic Jews would not stop the Nazis and the Vichy regime from seeing them that way. So what happened? Ultimately, Stein and Toklas were placed under the protection of Pétain’s office due to the influence of Faÿ.

Why did Faÿ do it? Obviously, friendship played an important role. But given his strongly anti-Semitic convictions, Faÿ could have maintained his friendship with Stein and Toklas only because he agreed that on some level that being born Jewish was not a problem.

Faÿ was Catholic. He believed that Jewishness could be washed away by conversion to Christianity. So did many of the Vichy officials who interacted with Stein and Toklas. Thus they believed that Jewishness was ultimately an attitude and a choice. Moreover, although Stein never converted to Christianity, and Toklas only converted in 1957, still, there was a sense in which they had converted to something other than Jews.

In the 1920s, Stein developed a strong interest in French popular cults, legends, and prophecies that grew up around Catholic saints. Stein had a genuine belief in the occult, which manifested itself during her undergraduate studies with William James at Harvard. Her thinking about saints was hardly orthodox. (She seemed to see herself as one.) But in its outward, practical manifestations, Stein’s interest in saints made her to all appearances “a believer” (p. 128). Thus Will writes:

After the War

When the Germans and the Vichy regime were driven out of France in 1944, Stein and Toklas faced a problem. Some collaborators were murdered in the streets. Others fled the country. Faÿ was arrested. When American soldiers and journalists discovered Stein and Toklas, they had reason to wonder if they would be arrested.

Imagine their relief, then, when they discovered that they were miraculous “survivors” of something later dubbed the Holocaust. Although Stein and Toklas had not exactly been hiding in an attic.

Many mainstream narratives about Stein claim that she became a collaborator out of fear, not conviction. Will rejects that flatly (p. 143). But it may be true of her post-war collaboration with the Allies, although there’s no question that Stein enjoyed her renewed celebrity.

Will regards Stein’s postwar writings as a strange mixture of prudence and provocation.

On the one hand, in her book Wars I Have Seen (1945), she conceals the help she received from the Vichy government, attributes her survival to local friends and officials, and even speaks warmly of the French Resistance.

On the other hand, regarding Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, Stein writes:

This is quite vague and ambiguous, perhaps intentionally so. Stein might be claiming that the Jews, through their passion for publicity, brought persecution on themselves. Another possible meaning is that the persecution simply was Jewish publicity at work, i.e., propaganda. Was Gertrude Stein an early “Holocaust denier”?

It is little wonder that her editor at Random House described the book as “at best reactionary and at worst reprehensible” (p. 189).

Stein’s Life magazine article “Off We All Went to See Germany,” has a disconcertingly light tone, and her post-war plays were an “uneasy mix of patriotism and reactionary criticism” (p. 189).

As Will sums it up, “Neither rabid nor resigned, Stein survived World War II—and emerged from it with her views on America, on Pétain, and on the overriding value of tradition, peace, and ordinary life more or less intact” (p. 191).

I highly recommend Unlikely Collaboration. It is proof that truth is often stranger than fiction, even Gertrude Stein’s fiction.

The following dialogue is based on a conversation I had recently with a self-described political “realist.”

The Realist: I’m sick of ideological debates. We don’t need the perfect ideology. We just need power.

GJ: I don’t have any interest in political ideas that don’t lead to power. I am interested in political ideologies because that’s how we get power. Even if you think you are going to get a hundred guys in rubber rafts and seize control of a tiny island in the Caribbean, you’re going to have to be on the same page with them about what you are doing and why.

The Realist: Not if they are mercenaries. Mercenaries work for money.

GJ: Even the idea that men will do anything and everything for money is an ideology, of course. That particular value system only became dominant in modernity.

If the men in your boats are selling their services to the highest bidder, is it your plan to be the highest bidder? Is that “realistic”?

The Realist: Of course not.

GJ: So are you counting on something besides money to bind the men to you? If so, what is it?

The Realist: Friendship? Honor?

GJ: You can’t even make a band of mercenaries function on purely mercenary grounds. You can’t be the master of men whose only loyalty is to money. Even a band of thieves need honor among them to work together.

What is honor in this situation? At the very least, it is the willingness to work together past the point when a purely self-interested man would quit. At this point, we arrive at the sort of “idealist” motives that you think are politically meaningless.

The Realist: But honor isn’t an ideology.

GJ: It is certainly an idealistic motivation, as opposed to the mercenary realism you were advocating. And yes, an ethics of honor is an ideology. Of course, the mercenary realism you count on is actually an ideology as well. You can formulate both of them in terms of principles and subject them to criticism, even though this isn’t how people actually learn an ethic.

The Realist: You can’t talk your way into power.

GJ: Actually, no, talking is the only way we will get into power. Even if you think you can seize power by force, the men who seize power alongside you must be bound together by more than force or money. They must be bound by honor. But beyond that, they must have some sort of shared goal, a vision of what they are after. That means a shared ideology. How do men come to share an ideology? They are talked into it. So even with a violent seizure of power, ideas must come first.

The Realist: But Greg, be realistic. Our enemies have all the cards. All the money. All the power. Most people are on their side.

GJ: Yes, that’s correct. But that’s not why you are despondent, is it?

The Realist: Then why?

GJ: You are despondent because you don’t think we can wrest their money and power away from them.

The Realist: Well, it takes money to make money. It takes power to check power.

GJ: And that’s why you are despondent. Because if that is true, then we really are in trouble, because you basically think that you can only beat power if you already have it. And since we don’t already have power, we can’t get it. If only power can beget power, then it is a circuit, a circle, and there’s no way to jump into the circle. You have defined the political problem in such a way that you can only lose. So of course you feel despondent.

But you are trapped by your materialist premises, which are ideas, by the way. You have thought yourself into thinking that thinking is impotent. Let’s see if we can think your way out of this trap.

My question to you is: “What dictates how our rulers use their money and power?”

The Realist: Their interests, obviously.

GJ: What interests?

The Realist: They want more money and more power.

GJ: That’s what Thomas Hobbes would say. But money and power are means. You are treating them as ends in themselves. Do you only want money and power as ends in themselves? Or do you want to do something with them?

Because if you only want money and power as ends in themselves, you have joined the wrong crowd. You should go to work for the establishment. You should be like Richard Spencer or Patrick Casey or Matt Forney. You should suck up to the powers that be, in the silly hope that they’ll find you useful.

The Realist: But the powers that be are evil. They’re wrong.

GJ: So you think that truth and morality are more important than money and power?

The Realist: I guess so.

GJ: Would you extend the same courtesy to our enemies? Do they think that matters of truth and morality are more important to them than money and power, meaning that they spend their money and power to do what they think is true and good?

The Realist: Maybe.

GJ: And if they shared your views of the true and the good, would their money and power be problems?

The Realist: Obviously not.

GJ: Then our struggle isn’t against mere flesh and blood. It isn’t against mere money and power. It is against the principles, and the implications of the principles, that hold sway over our world.

What defeats bad ideas?

The Realist: Better ideas, obviously.

GJ: Do we have better ideas?

The Realist: Yes, obviously.

GJ: Then we have the means to beat them. We have the means to talk our way into power.

The Realist: We aren’t going to be able to persuade everyone.

GJ: Obviously not. But we don’t need to. We just need to persuade enough people, the right people, the people who matter. Then the rest will come along through conformity, cooption, or compulsion. But in the beginning is the word.

Curtis Dozier
The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026

Curtis Dozier is one of my long-time academic stalkers. An associate professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College in New York, he is the director of Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, a website on which Leftist classics scholars bemoan “appropriations” of classical antiquity by “hate groups.” Naturally, my writers and I are all over Pharos and Dozier’s new book.

Pharos started strong in late 2017, but by 2021, it was clearly running out of steam. With the publication of The White Pedestal, now we learn why.

At first, Dozier’s mission was to indignantly repel “haters” as if the classics were a citadel of his own degenerate, anti-white egalitarian ideas:

But eventually, it dawned on Dozier that the racists are right:

It turns out that we aren’t just right, for Dozier finds a “disturbing depth and sophistication” in “a certain kind of white nationalist interpretation of Greco-Roman history” (p. 176). This came as some surprise, because like most liberals, Dozier thinks that people on the Right are uneducated:

I may have played a role in Dozier’s change of focus. Take a look at his essay “The Fourth Year of Pharos: What is the Emotional Toll?” from December 17, 2021:

(I have quoted Dozier at length, but I recommend reading the whole article.)

Indeed, Dozier has gone from attacking White Nationalists for allegedly misusing the classics to attacking the classics because they are actually White Nationalist:

Thus, The White Pedestal is “a book about the presence of white nationalist ideas in the Greco-Roman world, and the influence of such ideas on the way that history has been preserved, remembered, and interpreted” (p. 27).

So it turns out that White Nationalists have not “appropriated” classical civilization after all. Instead, it belongs to us by right. White Nationalists are the legitimate heirs of classical civilization.

But even I wouldn’t say that the Ancient Greeks and Romans were actually “White Nationalists.” Imagine what most of the Ancients would have made of my book Against Imperialism. You can construct a case for universal ethnonationalism from Ancient Greek philosophical and historical premises. I have done so. But such views were very much a minority viewpoint.

Or, as I prefer to think, they were ahead of their time. We can be critical of the Ancients, because in some ways we have advanced beyond them. The Ancients provide us with truths—as well as falsehoods. They offer us models of what to do—and what not to do. The one area in which the Ancients were not a mixed bag is aesthetics. But even there, we have improved upon the Greeks, particularly in music.

Of course, we can say that China and India provide us with food for thought as well. But there’s a difference: whether we love them or hate them, the Ancient Greeks and Romans are recognizably us. That cannot be said about China and India.

Personally, I regard Rome as more of a cautionary tale than a model for emulation. But the vices and follies and failings of Rome remain very much ours, whereas the excesses of Oriental civilization—the weird impersonalism, the hieratic petrification, the inhuman cruelty and chaos—remain alien and repulsive, not perennial temptations.

A Failure of Scholarship & Civility

The White Pedestal gets off to a very bad start:

There are three problems with this.

First, this is simply unprofessional. Scholars should cite their sources, otherwise, what is stopping them from simply making up quotes and facts? Yale University Press is a scholarly publisher. Presumably, they have standards of scholarly integrity. Thus they never should have allowed this. Vassar College is an institution of higher education. Presumably, they have standards of scholarship as well. Would Vassar allow a white male student to get away with not citing a liberal? If not, then why allow one of their faculty? Did this book contribute in any way to Dozier’s promotion or tenure? Frankly, Yale should pulp this book, and Vassar should censure Dozier for violating basic standards of scholarship and professional ethics.

A case in point: all told, I am mentioned 34 times in The White Pedestal, and Counter-Currents is mentioned 37 times. The latter number would be much higher if Dozier had deigned to actually cite the White Nationalist publications he quotes.

There is, moreover, something odd about the works Dozier chooses to cite by me: all of them were published before 2019. But in 2019, I published From Plato to Postmodernism. In 2023, I published The Trial of Socrates. In 2025, I published Tyranny and Wisdom: Plato’s Greater Alcibiades and Gorgias. All of these are certainly relevant to Dozier’s project. So why didn’t he cite them?

My hypothesis is simple: this book started as the Pharos blog, which Dozier lost interest in by the end of 2021. My strong impression is that this book is simply cobbled together from his blog research. If Dozier did essentially no additional research after 2021, then it would make sense for him not to cite my books on ancient philosophy.

It might also make sense for him not to cite White Nationalist sources, lest it become clear to his publisher, colleagues, and employers that he had stopped doing research years before his book was written. I seriously doubt that Yale or Vassar or the scholars who contributed promotional quotes would have looked favorably upon a book dealing with a current intellectual trend that doesn’t deal with the last five years of that trend.

In short, maybe Dozier is not citing his sources to cover up his own shoddy research. Frankly, every researcher who refuses to cite sources should immediately be suspected of fraud.

Second, Dozier’s gesture simply assumes that academia has an endless capital of “legitimacy,” a commodity that White Nationalists seek and that he can dispense or withhold. This is a very primitive, Leftist attitude: legitimacy is somehow just there, to be looted or hoarded. The question of how legitimacy is produced does not seem to have entered Dozier’s mind.

Academia only has legitimacy because it pursues and passes on the truth. One of the assurances of truth, however, is that scholarly works can be confirmed by outside reviewers. But this is only possible if scholars cite their sources. If Dozier doesn’t cite his sources, then he has no academic legitimacy to confer, and neither do Yale University Press or Vassar College or the people who have praised this book.

Third, Dozier’s gesture is deeply uncivil. Civility is how we deal with differences of opinion in the same political system. Of course, civility only makes sense if you envision continuing to live with people. Dozier evidently envisions a world in which White Nationalists do not exist. (See my essay, “Civility and its Discontents.”)

A Puzzling Mishmash

Dozier’s first chapter, “The Who and the Why of White Nationalist History” begins with . . . Tucker Carlson, being fired from Fox after promoting a “conspiracy theory” (p. 16) called the Great Replacement created by French writer Renaud Camus. Moreover, as Dozier solemnly reports, the Great Replacement was referred to by Brenton Tarrant, who slaughtered a bunch of Muslims in New Zealand.

Why mention any of this in a book on White Nationalism and the classics? Camus does refer to Plato, but it has no real connection to the Great Replacement as an idea, much less Tucker Carlson, much less Tarrant and his killing spree. The lurid opening is simply dictated by the nature of the book, which is a smear job.

The rest of the chapter surveys a number of White Nationalist and broadly New Right thinkers who deal with the classics, some quite tangentially: Dominique Venner, who was a great admirer of Homer; Alain de Benoist, who worked with Venner; Revilo Oliver, who was an actual classics professor, although it had precious little to do with his political work; George Lincoln Rockwell, who has nothing to do with the classics but created the American Nazi Party, which sounds scary; William Pierce, who had a Ph.D. in physics and opinions on the ancient world (of course Dozier also mentions the Oklahoma City Bombing); Kevin MacDonald, Editor of The Occidental Quarterly, which has published on topics related to classical antiquity; and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, which uses an Ionic column in its logo. (Perhaps VDare would have received more attention if they had bought a neoclassical mansion rather than a medieval castle.) I am also mentioned in this chapter, as is Counter-Currents. Enoch Powell, Ricardo Duchesne, Costin Alamariu, and F. Roger Devlin all have Ph.D.s and have written about the classical world, but they are not mentioned until later chapters.

Dozier devotes a section to classical discussions of the Jewish Question, remarking that “White nationalists are able to muster such an impressive range of sources because they know how to do their research” (p. 30). Then he mentions Robert Bowers, the gunman who attacked the Tree of Life Synagogue outside of Pittsburgh. This is Dozier engaging in what Orwell called “crimestop.” The Bowers attack is tossed in lest Dozier—or his readers—start thinking seriously about what the ancient Greeks and Romans said about Jews.

The whole chapter is a lurid, hare-brained mishmash which gives the impression that it wasn’t so much written as simply dragged and dropped.

Chapter 2, “The Last Stand Against Modernity,” deals with classical warrior virtues. Naturally, it begins with the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021. Dozier devotes a few pages to my discussion of thumos (pp. 45–47). Perhaps I flatter myself, but I detect an undertone of grudging respect.

Chapter 3, “Predicting the New Dark Ages,” deals with White Nationalist discussions of the decline of Rome, which we of course use as a heuristic for understanding our own decadence. Dozier grants that “white nationalist intellectuals may not be far off base in granting Gibbon pride of place in their list of historians who provide legitimacy for their positions” (p. 74).

Chapter 4, “The Descendants of Achilles,” deals with claims about the whiteness of the Greeks and Romans and the continuity of white civilization from antiquity to the present. Dozier, like most Leftist academics, repeats the imbecilic mantra that race is “pseudoscientific” (p. 5), which makes possible such pronouncements as, “White nationalists know that the reality of genetics obliterates their claim to share a racial identity with the ancient Greeks” (p. 91). In truth, racial differences are obvious to prescientific experience, which remains valid even though scientific explanations of these experiences might come and go with time. (See my essay “Why Race Is Not a Social Construct.”)

Chapter 5, “The Prometheans,” is another strange mishmash: less a composition than a car crash, a forty-car freeway pileup in prose. The chapter begins with some inchoate hand-wringing about classical architecture. Basically, Dozier is struggling with the question, “How can I like classical architecture, given that Donald Trump likes it?” Indeed, classical architecture is “the preferred style of dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini” (p. 111). Sure, but classical architecture was also the preferred style of people like Stalin as well. So what does this have to do with the aesthetic value of classical architecture? Dozier seems haunted by non-white anti-colonial voices who are neurotically triggered by classical architecture. He needs to just ignore them.

The chapter then leaps to F. Roger Devlin’s review essay on The Landmark Herodotus, which I commissioned back when I edited The Occidental Quarterly. Dozier, however, refuses to cite the original article’s source. He even refuses to use Devlin’s name, which is an uncivil touch. He does, however, grant that his “understanding of Herodotus has been the dominant one” (p. 119). Namely, Devlin emphasizes Herodotus’ contrasts between Greek and Oriental civilization and politics.

After that, the chapter jumps to Richardo Duchesne’s articles on the foundational importance of the Greeks for Western civilization. Dozier grants that Duchesne is also in harmony with most classical scholars.

Then Dozier discusses ranking civilizations, hopping around from Charles Murray to the Council of Conservative Citizens to Andrew Anglin to Francis Galton and eugenics, finally lighting on . . . Graham Hancock, who peddles genuinely pseudoscientific speculations about ancient civilizations and myths like Atlantis. Dozier solemnly declares that the vast literature on Atlantis “may seem to be nothing more than harmless quackery” but he detects that “the assumption of white supremacy lurks at its core” (p. 132).

Chapter 6, “The (Un)Natural Order,” deals with the idea of natural hierarchy in Greco-Roman thought. Naturally, the chapter begins with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017. After all, Unite the Right was about saving a Confederate monument, and antebellum Southerners loved classical columns and literature. Also, some of the protesters emblazoned themselves with SPQR and the fasces.

One of these young men was James Fields, Jr., who will die in jail for killing a protester in a car accident in the chaos following the Unite the Right rally. Dozier, however, pointedly does not mention his name. Nor does he mention the name of Dylan Storm Roof, who killed nine blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Roof also liked the Confederacy and thus, presumably, Greek columns as well.

These deaths are mentioned because, “The presence of classical symbolism at the Charlottesville rally illustrates how the work of white nationalist intellectuals such as that published by Counter-Currents informs the actions of violent white nationalist activists in the real world” (p. 138).

This is disgusting dishonesty. What, exactly, is he insinuating here with the weasel word “informs”? Dozier gives absolutely no basis for believing that Fields or Roof ever read Counter-Currents. Nor does he offer evidence that they were influenced by Counter-Currents. Moreover, if they had read Counter-Currents, Fields would have stayed away from Unite the Right, and Roof would not have shot a bunch of people, because I explicitly warned people away from Unite the Right, and I explicitly condemn terrorism.

But apparently to Dozier’s mind, what I actually said pales in probative value compared to the fact that I write about Socrates, and James Fields carried a shield with a fasces, and Dylan Roof liked the Confederacy, and those are all somehow linked together by Greek columns. Frankly, this smacks of paranoid schizophrenia . . . or pandering to it.

There is a tone of paranoia and near hysteria throughout The White Pedestal. Imagine Dana Carvey reading this in his Church Lady voice:

Dozier is unintentionally funny when he describes “Identity Evropa, the white nationalist organization that terrorized college campuses with posters featuring classical sculpture” (p. 139). Contrast this with Dozier’s reference to the “overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter movement” (p. 122).

Chapter 7, “The Dream of a White Homeland,” hovers vaguely and inconclusively around classical ideas connected to diversity and homogeneity.

Who Are the Guardians of Classical Civilization?

Dozier’s “Conclusion: Taking the Classics Forward” is a call to make academic classics programs even more politically correct, since the classical world and its legacy are so far out of step with the radical egalitarian ideology that grips today’s academy.

Dozier, of course, thinks that all people are basically equal. Thus all inequalities are merely socially contingent constructs that can be done away with by reeducation and social engineering. So nothing bad can really happen to classical studies by promoting more diversity: i.e., highlighting non-whites in classical history, trying to appeal to non-white readers and students, and promoting women and non-whites into the classics profession.

There are two problems with this.

First, all of these efforts at diversification are accompanied by lies. Leftists don’t just seek out “diversity” in our past. They simply fabricate it. Does Curtis Dozier have the guts to tell Afrocentrists that, no, Greek culture was not stolen from Egyptians and that, no, the Ancient Egyptians were not black? If so, then he is not a trustworthy guardian of our classical heritage.

Moreover, the promotion of women and non-whites in academia has thoroughly corrupted every discipline, for you can’t hire the best man for the job if you have a competing qualification, namely diversity. (See my essay “How Diversity Destroys.”)

Does Curtis Dozier have the guts to uphold professional standards when women and non-whites seek scholarships, jobs, and promotion? The answer is suggested simply by noting that he approvingly quotes the wisdom of Ibram X. Kendi (p. 15).

The second problem is much more fundamental. What if people really aren’t equal? What if different races and cultures really are different? What if we see ourselves in classical civilization because it really is ours? What if it fits us because we created it, and it created us? What if non-whites don’t see themselves in classical civilization because it isn’t the sort of civilization they would create for themselves?

What if “white privilege” just means that white people have created a civilization that we find comfortable for us, just as “Japanese privilege” means that Japanese society is an expression of the Japanese people? If so, that entails that other races inevitably find our civilization uncomfortable, just as non-Japanese will inevitably feel out of place in Japan. (See my essay “The Very Idea of White Privilege.”)

If races and civilizations really are different, then we cannot carry forward our classical heritage by trying to appeal to the sensibilities of non-white students. Nor are non-white faculty reliable guardians of our classical heritage, because on some deep level, it will inevitably feel alien to them, because it really isn’t theirs.

This is why I have long maintained that not only are White Nationalists the legitimate heirs of white civilization, but we are also the only people who can preserve it and carry it forward. Modern academia, by contrast, is anti-white and thus incompatible with the survival of our civilization. Many academics are actively anti-white, while others are merely too weak to oppose the destruction of our civilization. Thus for White Nationalists, true regime change requires more than just a new government. It requires a complete purge of anti-whites and their enablers from academia and all other institutions that shape the culture.

Along with its lapses of civility and taste, The White Pedestal contains a number of simple factual errors. For instance, F. Roger Devlin has a Ph.D. in philosophy, not political science (p. 117). William H. Regnery II is correctly referred to as the nephew of the founder of Regnery Publishing (p. 24) and incorrectly referred to as one of the heirs of the Regnery Publishing fortune on p. 87. The latter error is quite common in “anti-hate” literature, and the fact that it appears alongside the truth reinforces the idea that this book was hastily cobbled together from blog posts written at different times. Dozier also claims that Counter-Currents celebrates Enoch Powell’s birthday every year (p. 55). We don’t, but I will take it under advisement.

The White Pedestal is useful for White Nationalists simply for the grudging respect Dozier offers us. Dozier has weighed the evidence and declares, against his personal interest as an academic classics scholar, that Ancient Greece and Rome are more aligned with White Nationalism than the academic Left.

Of course, this only matters if we take Dozier, Yale University Press, Vassar College, and academia in general seriously as authorities. But Dozier himself makes that impossible by completely abandoning basic scholarly standards. Thus I cannot recommend The White Pedestal. It is a despicable intellectual performance and a miserable read.

As Kevin Deanna has observed, every election is now the most important election of our lifetimes, and we are always one electoral defeat away from total disaster.

It didn’t used to be that way. Twenty years ago, it was easy for White Nationalists to be indifferent to electoral politics because, from our point of view, there were no real choices between the major political parties. Our options were only slightly different versions of anti-whitism: open borders, globalization, multiculturalism, and pandering to perpetually aggrieved minorities. We could vote for anything, as long as it was anti-white.

Since overturning anti-whiteness is the most important issue for me, I saw no point in voting. Instead, I was focused on broadening the options at the ballot box by persuading people that white survival is at stake and that we need closed borders and remigration to save our race and civilization.

At this point, we can introduce a distinction between politics and what I like to call metapolitics. Metapolitics is what comes before politics. In this case, politics is about choosing between the different political options on the ballot, whereas metapolitics determines what issues are on the ballot in the first place.

If you want to know the dominant values of a society, the things that are sacrosanct, you don’t look at the things you can vote on. High taxes aren’t sacred if you can vote for low taxes. Freedom of speech is not sacred if you can vote for censorship. What is sacred in a society is what you can’t vote against.

I call such ideas “hegemonic,” since hegemony is a form of domination. But hegemony is not specifically political power. Hegemonic ideas don’t need to struggle against other ideas in the political realm. Instead, they set the range of possible political battles. Anti-whiteness is hegemonic, which is why all we can vote for are different flavors of anti-whiteness.

Politics today is much more exciting for White Nationalists because our metapolitical efforts are paying off. In 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, immigration and globalization—both of them anti-white—were politically hegemonic. There was a consensus in the major political parties not to compete on these issues, even if voters wanted it. Trump rejected that consensus. He questioned the value of globalization and immigration. That’s why millions of Americans rejoiced, myself included. Similar nationalist, populist, and immigration-restrictionist ideas were making headway in Europe as well.

No, Trump and other national populists are not rejecting anti-whiteness as such. But they are rejecting crucial anti-white policies, and that’s a start. They are doing things we would do if we were in power. Granted, they aren’t doing them for the reasons that we would do them. But their policies, if carried through, will at least slow down white demographic decline. This will give White Nationalists more time to set things right.

Anti-whites have reacted to national populism with equal but opposite passions. Political “civility”—which just means acceptance of the same hegemonic ideas—has broken down. Before the rise of national populism, white extinction was simply built into the political process. Pro-whites couldn’t fight against it, and anti-whites didn’t have to fight for it. But now white survival is the great political battle of our time.

This is why politics has become increasingly polarized, uncivil, and existential. Whites are now literally fighting for our existence, and the Left is literally fighting for our destruction. The Left see this as an existential struggle too, for anti-whiteness is now the only thing sacred to the Left. The political center is the “common ground” between Left and Right. The center will slowly disappear, because there is no middle ground between white survival and white extinction, and no issue is more important.

Left and Right are no longer different political tendencies within the same people. Instead, they are rapidly becoming two different peoples: quite explicitly with the Left, which has bet everything on race-replacement immigration. But when two different peoples share the same territory and political system, there can be no peace. They must either separate or fight it out.

Multiparty democracy is dying in America. Multiparty democracy presupposes that it is safe to hand the power of the state—in effect, a loaded gun—over to one’s political opponents from time to time. But the Left clearly thinks the Right is too dangerous to be allowed back into power. Thus, as soon as the Left returns to power in the US, they will try to ban the Right altogether. It is slowly dawning on the Right that they can’t afford to let this happen. It is madness to hand state power to those who regard our destruction as a holy cause. Whichever party bans the opposition first will rule unopposed.

This is why every new election will be the most important of our lifetimes, and why we are all ways one election away from disaster.

So, are we going to keep doing this forever?

Obviously, not. We simply need to ban the Left, which is to say: the militant vanguard of anti-white politics. But there are superficial and deep ways to do this, which correspond to the distinction between politics and metapolitics.

Banning the Left politically means shutting down its parties and NGOs and banning its members from participating in political life. The sooner we do this, the better. Nothing can be fixed until that happens.

But it is only a short-term solution. The long-term solution is to purge the Left from all important institutions of society: education, the media, publishing, the arts, the churches, etc. In short, we must eject the Left from any institution that shapes the culture and minds of the next generation. For if we leave these institutions in the hands of Leftists, they will simply create more Leftists. Thus the only way to permanently defeat the Left is to break the mold, so no new Leftists are produced.

Victory is not a party of the Right taking power and then defending itself forever against the ceaseless onslaught of rabid Leftists. Instead, victory is ending the Left forever by seizing the means of cultural production.

As a White Nationalist, I define ultimate victory as making pro-white ideas hegemonic, meaning that being pro-white is the essential condition for entering polite society and participating in the political process. What could be more natural than making the identity and interests of a people sacrosanct in its own homeland?

A metapolitical victory will allow us to relax in the political realm. We can even allow multiparty democracy again. You’ll be able to vote for anything, as long as it is pro-white.

Is such a victory even possible? Of course it is. The hegemony of anti-white ideas was established within the lifetimes of many of my readers. We simply need to study how it was created, then use the same techniques to overthrow it and establish a pro-white hegemony in its place.

If we want our people to survive, then we must make our interests and our identity sacrosanct, for what we hold to be sacred is what we will hold onto until the end.

Counter-Currents, April 30, 2026

Since 2011, Counter-Currents has organized private, invitation-only weekend retreats for our writers, donors, and friends. We have had many distinguished speakers and guests, including Jonathan Bowden, Kevin MacDonald, Mark Weber, Jared Taylor, Charles Krafft, Roger Devlin, and Edward Dutton.

One purpose of these retreats is to foster real-world fellowship and collaborations. We keep the size small (under 50) and the program loose to make it easier to socialize and network. We don’t have a lot of talks, but we do have panel discussions, debates, and Q&As to encourage audience participation, in fact to break down the distinction between the audience and the speakers.

In 2023, Counter-Currents held its first European retreat. It made sense, because we have many European writers, donors, and friends. In 2025 we held our second. This year, we held our third in the Eternal City herself.

Why Rome? Because, the meme says, we seldom go a day without thinking about Rome. Ancient Rome is one of the foundational cultures of our civilization, and Rome remains one of the world’s great cities. Thus if we held our retreat in Rome, a lot of people would say “yes” with no hesitation. I was right.

Rome is important to our movement not just for its rich past. Rome is also the headquarters of CasaPound, a very significant social movement of the Italian Right. CasaPound began in Rome 23 years ago when fans of the rock band ZetaZeroAlfa decided to squat in an abandoned 7-story building owned by the city of Rome on the via Napoleone III near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Since then, CasaPound has grown into a social movement encompassing all of Italy, with members and centers in all 20 Regions, all social classes, from rural areas and small towns to the largest cities.

Last year, I was in Rome and stumbled across the CasaPound headquarters. I’d been so caught up in Rome’s past that it had not even occurred to me to reach out to CasaPound. The Italian far-Right is huge, a world unto itself, and thus somewhat insular vis-à-vis the rest of the Right. But it turns out that I was mistaken. CasaPound is actually quite active in pursuing international contacts.

I had two contacts at CasaPound: Alberto Palladino, a photographer I met at Kyiv’s Reconquista Club in 2018, and Guido Taietti, an acquaintance of Fróði Midjord. Guido put me in touch with a gentleman named Sébastian, who is in charge of outreach. He replied promptly to my Whatsapp message. That was the first thing that impressed me: prompt replies are one of the key habits of highly effective nationalists.

That very day I met with Sébastian at a local bar. He struck me as highly intelligent, diplomatic, well-spoken, and well-informed. The next day, he gave me a tour of CasaPound and its bookstore, La Testa di Ferro (The Head of Iron). That evening, we visited CasaPound’s private speakeasy, the Cutty Sark. In the coming days, I was introduced to a number of CasaPound associates, including Domenico Di Tullio, a lawyer and novelist. (Next month, Middle Europe Books will release Angelo Plume’s translation of his novel about CasaPound, Nessun Dolore [No Pain].)

Ideologically, CasaPound is “identitiarian” in the broad sense of the term: they value the differences of the word and wish to preserve them against a homogenizing form of globalization. CasaPound is neither capitalist nor socialist but Third Positionist. They strongly support social solidarity and social services among Italians.

CasaPound are Italian nationalists, yet they have a pan-European sensibility. The very name CasaPound comes from the American poet Ezra Pound. Sébastian is French, and CasaPound maintains good relationships with identitarian groups all over the white world.

CasaPound is also explicitly fascist, which works in Italy, since it is part of their political tradition and was never fully suppressed after the Second World War. Many Italians are nostalgic about the Fascist period, which created buildings, monuments, and infrastructure that still outshine the miserable productions of the post-WWII era.

I am not an expert on CasaPound, just a sympathetic outside observer. But I have seen enough to know that we have nothing like it in America. Here are a few observations.

Beyond their ideological stands, what impressed me most about CasaPound is their ability to build community and organizations. Obviously, CasaPound is very good at creating solidarity among their members. They have many dedicated activists, because they demand commitment and work.

Although CasaPound is strongly populist, even socialist, they run everything in a very businesslike manner. It is fashionable to complain about the 1%, but in truth, fewer than 1% of people are capable of starting and maintaining a business. But CasaPound has attracted many such people. Creating economically self-sustaining institutions is surely one key to their success and longevity. It’s also a very Roman trait. The ancient Romans had an honor culture, but they never fought a war if it could not sustain itself financially. That kind of shrewd pragmatism was one of the secrets of Rome’s long-term success. (On the same Roman principle, we did not green-light the Retreat until it was clear that it would pay for itself.)

I was also impressed with CasaPound’s ethos. It isn’t something that they engrave on tablets and put on walls. It’s just something that you pick up by being around the people.

• The first thing I noticed is that although they are based in a very multicultural neighborhood—Domenico Di Tullio describes CasaPound as “the Italian embassy in Esquilino”—CasaPound members don’t seem to spend a lot of time complaining about the situation. Perhaps that’s because they are so busy doing things.

• CasaPound is a militant organization. Everyone is trained to fight and not to back down. But they do not seek out conflict or people with chips on their shoulders. Again, it helps to have a lot of constructive projects.

• CasaPound deftly avoids religious sectarian traps.

• Although they are committed to helping their fellow Italians, CasaPound don’t take in people with drug and alcohol problems.

All of this strikes me as very sound and worthy of imitation by other groups. CasaPound will definitely repay the efforts of further study.

When I decided to hold our retreat in Rome, I hoped that we would at least be able to hold a tour of the CasaPound headquarters, the bookstore, and the Cutty Sark. Also, since I like to keep money in the movement, I asked Sébastian to recommend some friendly businesses that we could use for catering. And in the back of my mind, I hoped that we could hold our actual retreat at the CasaPound headquarters in the meeting room named for Dominique Venner. And that’s what happened.

The retreat began with a reception and dinner on a Friday night. The retreat proper was held the next day. We had to juggle the program a bit, so the schedule was more tightly packed than normal, but everyone seemed to have be good time. The retreat began with talks by Kevin Deanna and me. We also had three panels: one on What Rome Means to Us, another from CasaPound members on religion, and another on “elevator pitches”: quick pitches to the wealthy on why they should support our movement. It is a useful exercise. Jared Taylor, Kevin Deanna, Roger Devlin, Collin Cleary, David Zsutty, Meni from Fons Perennis, Alberto Palladino, Chiara from CasaPound, Endeavour, and yours truly were among the speakers.

On Sunday we had a panel on community organizing with Paul Waggner of the Wolves of Vinland, Kevin Deanna, and David Zsutty. Keith Woods was there and filmed a tour of CasaPound as well as an interview with me. The retreat ended with a lunch, during which we celebrated the birthdays of five attendees and one past speaker, Jonathan Bowden.

After the retreat proper was over, half of the attendees stayed on for five days of tourism. We saw all the highlights. From Ancient Rome, we saw the Colosseum, Forum, Palatine Hill, Pantheon, Ara Pacis, and the Mausoleum of Augustus, as well as Castel St. Angelo, the fortress built on the ruins of the Mausoleum of Hadrian. From Renaissance and Baroque Rome, we saw St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Museums, the Capitoline Museum, the Galleria Borghese, and the Galleria Doria-Pamphili. From Mussolini’s Rome, we saw the striking buildings of the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, the Foro Italico, and the EUR district. A good time was had by all.

Vilfredo Pareto noticed a pattern in human affairs that he expressed with the 80/20 rule. About 20% of causes produce 80% of effects, for good or ill: 20% of people commit 80% of crime; 20% of people do 80% of good things as well. Smart people focus on the 20% of work that produces the 80% of rewards.

I have to remind myself of the 80/20 rule whenever I do CC Retreats: because they are so much fun, I feel like I am goofing off, but in truth such events are part of the 20% of efforts that produce 80% of the rewards, because nothing serious can happen until our movement comes offline into the real world and builds real human relationships and collaborations.

We had an excellent videographer present. We will share videos in the coming weeks.

I want to thank everyone who attended, the well-wishers who could not attend but sent donations in their place, Cyan and other members of the Counter-Currents team, Sébastian and his team at CasaPound, and all of writers, readers, and supporters who make Counter-Currents possible.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/counter-currents-in-rome/

Now for your streaming or downloading pleasure.

On Tuesday, April 21st, a Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering based on FBI and IRS investigations. (See press release here.)

According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid more than $3 million to people affiliated with such Right-wing groups as:

• The Ku Klux Klan

• United Klans of America

• Unite the Right

• National Alliance

• National Socialist Movement

• Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club

• National Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party)

• American Front

These payments went beyond simply paying informants to collect information, which is what the SPLC’s donors were supporting them to do. Instead, it is alleged that the SPLC was shaping the messaging of these groups and helping them to organize events—which the SPLC would then decry as “hate” and use as a basis to rush back to their donors to raise more funds.

Thus Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public. They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal—and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

Apparently, the supply of “extremism” and “hate” was not sufficient to support the SPLC’s rapacious fundraising, so they just manufactured some hate. It is no different in principle from rabbis spray-painting swastikas on synagogues, or blacks spray-painting the word “nigger,” and then posing as victims of hate crimes.

But it was far more lucrative. For a mere investment of $3 million to manufacture hate, the SPLC raised almost $1 billion in donations to fight hate between 2014 and 2023.

When I heard about the indictment, I uncorked some cheap champagne—something that pairs well with popcorn—and kicked back to watch the internet go crazy.

Here are my thoughts.

It should be news to no one that White Nationalism, like other dissident political movements, is targeted by governments and non-governmental organizations for surveillance, infiltration, and subversion.

As White Nationalist, I have an interest in knowing who the infiltrators and informants are. First, we need to purge them. It would be nice if some of them do jail time for their crimes. Second, it would be good to know what damage they did. Perhaps movement organizations and individuals can pursue damages in court. Third, it would help us create a more accurate psychological profile of such traitors, so we can keep them out in the future.

The Trump administration also has an interest in outing at least some of these informants and infiltrators. They will not, of course, out the federal government’s own operatives. But they have an interest in outing the informants of an NGO such as the SPLC, which routinely slurs the Trump administration by linking it to White Nationalists and other “extremist” groups on the Right.

These slurs really sting people like Trump. The hallmark of the “normie” conservative is the conviction that “racism” and identity politics for white people are simply evil. Of course, this only applies to white racism and identity politics. The GOP routinely panders to non-white racists and identitarians, as does the rest of the political mainstream. Indeed, anti-white racism is now the one unifying characteristic of the political mainstream. The American Right is steadily shedding this dogma, but it remains especially powerful among Boomers like Trump.

Thus, when the Justice Department discovered that the SPLC had not just been watching and infiltrating “hate groups” but actually putting money in their coffers, directing their messaging, helping to organize their events, and then raising funds off of the results, they naturally regarded this as a way to kill two birds with one stone: take down the SPLC for fraud and smear the far Right as being astroturfed by the Left.

Claiming that the far Right is fake has long been popular among low-IQ MAGA influencers. When Trump was out of office and not running the Feds, MAGAtards loved to claim that far-Right groups like Patriot Front were “Feds” paid to make Trump look bad. Now that Trump is head Fed, they have smoothly pivoted to the claim that Unite the Right was astroturfed by the SPLC.

So is this good or bad for White Nationalism?

It is an unmitigated boon. The SPLC, one of the banes of our existence, will be weakened by this. It may even be destroyed.

But how is it a good thing that White Nationalist groups had high-level infiltrators? It isn’t. But given that there were such infiltrators, it is good to know who they are. It isn’t good to have cancer, but it is good to know if you have it. This news is not akin to cancer. It is akin to the diagnosis. Thus the Trump administration has done our movement a huge favor. Thank you, President Trump.

But isn’t it bad that smooth brains on X are claiming that the entire White Nationalist milieu is simply astroturfed by the Left? Sure, in a perfect world, in which there were no stupid and dishonest people, this would not be happening. But that’s not reality.

Good news is still good news, no matter what idiots twist it into.

We are lied about and slandered all the time. This is just a drop in the ocean. Beyond that, it isn’t even a new slander.

Intelligent people are not taken in, and more of them are coming to our side every day.

The claim that our movement is astroturfed is the same sort of wishful thinking that attributes national populism to a few charismatic politicians deceiving the masses.

In truth, our movement has far firmer foundations. Nationalism, populism, and white identity politics are growing because of the failures of liberalism, multiculturalism, and globalization.

There’s a great deal of speculation about who the informants actually are. Naturally, everyone thinks that their least favorite nationalist is the villain. I see little reason to get too worked up over this. These operatives do not enjoy the immunity of federal informants. All their names will be revealed eventually.

When the SPLC goes on trial for manufacturing hate and defrauding its donors, I wonder what an Alabama jury will think of it. Here’s hoping that the SPLC is shut down, its assets distributed to its victims, and its operatives perp-waddled off to enjoy the joys of diversity in close quarters.

We are spending today in the company of friends, sharing ideas, fellowship, and jokes. There’s a lot of laughter. Any outside observer would say that we’re a cheerful lot. But we are gathered here because we all share a very serious belief, namely that if we do nothing, our race has no future.

Of course we are doing something, and there’s increasing reason for hope, but the threat remains with us, a death’s head at our feast, because “doing something” doesn’t matter unless that “something” eventually includes winning. And for that, we need political leaders, not just thinkers, authors, and podcasters.

Years ago, a listener on a livestream asked me a question. Given what our race is facing, whoever turns things around will be the greatest hero of all time. He might someday be worshipped as a god. So why aren’t more people coming forward?

The crown of our people is in the gutter. Eternal glory belongs to whoever picks it up. So why are there so few contenders today for such an honor?

It is a good question. I’d like to share my thoughts and hear yours.

First of all, although the image of one man on a white horse riding to the rescue is very powerful, it won’t just be one man. Our whole race needs saving. But if that immense task falls on the shoulders of one man—well, that might be why so few people are coming forward, because the task seems impossible.

When faced with an intimidatingly large task, the best way to complete it is to break it down into smaller ones.

There are many white tribes and many white countries. They all face the same decline. They all require the same solutions. So leaders must come forth from each of them.

There are 52 historically white countries in the world today, all of which had white identities and majorities in the last half century. Ideally, I would like to see white preservationist movements in all of them.

So we don’t need just one guy. We need more than 50. Of course, this observation doesn’t diminish the problem; it increases it. It doesn’t answer the question; it just makes it more poignant.

Second, although we obviously want more and better contenders grasping for eternal glory, we are already seeing such people. I have seen more and better people joining our cause every single year of the quarter century I have been involved. That trend is sustained both by the problems we face and the solutions we offer. Since the system won’t stop creating problems, and we won’t stop offering solutions, I expect that trend to continue.

Third, we want great political leaders, because we know that one man can save a nation. But the desire for a man on a white horse, the desire for a dictator to set things right, is often a confession of loneliness and desperation.

Just look at the evil people running things. Just look at the hopelessly deluded masses that support them. It is quite natural to conclude that you need one man with the power to clear the current leaders out, quell the opposition, and force the normies to abandon their televisions and putting greens and—to borrow a phrase from my friend Tito Perdue—acquire a taste for marching through field and forest singing songs of death.

But even the greatest leader cannot save his people alone. No man is a leader until he acquires the first follower. We remember King Leonidas, but he could have done nothing without his 300 bodyguards, plus Sparta’s allies.

If you don’t feel cut out to be a political leader, you shouldn’t just loaf around waiting for someone to rescue you. Instead, you should try to be the best possible follower: develop skills, build up your network, polish your resume, accumulate assets, become an asset to any movement you belong to. Work to build a movement that can attract or foster a great leader, or leaders.

Perhaps the leader you are waiting for is actually waiting for you to show signs of worthiness.

Beyond that, if you work diligently on becoming the best nationalist you can be, and networking with likeminded people, you will find that your sense of being alone will diminish, and so will your pining for a man on a white horse. Because you will be part of a whole cavalry.

Aristotle observed that one-man rule is natural if we have one individual whose virtues tower above those of his contemporaries. If, however, one has many superior individuals, then aristocracy is the natural regime, for if there are many men of merit, they will not suffer one of them to rule the rest forever.

I believe that our movement has been retarded by two models: the totalitarian political movement and the religious cult, which has now spawned a mutant strain, the podcaster cult of personality. The common denominator is a permanent and dramatic difference between leaders and followers. We must be honest. Many people hunger to be followers. But we must be wary of that. I am even warier of the people who hunger to be leaders.

One trap of the dictatorship/cult model is that the Dear Leader always wants to be the smartest guy in the room. But unless he really is the smartest guy around, that’s a bad model, because it makes improvement virtually impossible. The Dear Leader isn’t looking for peers. He isn’t looking for mentors. He’s looking for a few hatchetmen and a lot of “paypigs.” It repulses better people.

Thus if we want the movement to grow and improve, we need a better model. I suggest that we look to the aristocratic republics of the ancient world. We want to attract truly superior people. But the best people do not hunger for sycophants. They want to be around people they look up to.

Of course, the ancients understood the need for leadership. The Roman aristocracy invented the office of the dictator to serve the common good in times of emergency. But dictatorships were granted for fixed terms or the duration of the crisis that prompted them. The Romans saw dictatorship as a sword, to be drawn only in most dire need, then sheathed quickly when the need has passed. As they found out, permanent dictatorship is the road to ruin.

Wilmot Robertson had faith that when the fateful hour tolls, leaders will come forth, and they would not be people he knew. They would come as complete surprises. I share that conviction. Our movement is vast and growing. More than ten years ago, I gave up even trying to keep track of all the new platforms and personalities popping up every day.

So just because you don’t know anyone with the skills of a Napoleon, that doesn’t mean such people aren’t already out there. There are lots of quiet, thoughtful young men watching and learning and waiting for their moment to take part.

Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain gives me a great deal of hope. But two years ago, I had never heard of him. Now I want him to be Lord Protector—for the duration of the current crisis, of course.

Here are a few things we can do to foster the rise of a new elite from which leaders can emerge.

First, we need to increase the number of people who are on our side, who believe what we believe about what’s true and good. In short, we need to change minds. The more the better. But at the top, we want quality, not quantity. Thus we must sift the people who come to us for the very best: the best in character, intellect, education, skills, taste, connections, etc.

Second, we need to create a genuine leadership cadre. That means bringing people together in the real world, not just to educate them, but also to build friendship and trust and lay the foundations for common projects and common struggles. That’s why we have gathered here today.

Third, in addition to increasing peoples’ desire to get involved, we must also lower their resistance. What is the main source of resistance? It isn’t physical violence. That happens rarely, and only to people who publicly speak their minds. But what keeps people from speaking their minds in the first place?

Years ago, at a movement gathering, a young fellow started bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t talk about his convictions in public for fear of losing his livelihood. One of the people present, a rather abrasive old man, piped up: “What, you don’t want to be a hero?” He may have made an enemy that day, but he also made a good point.

That’s really the question we face. Why don’t more people want to be heroes?

In the abstract, of course, everyone would like to be a hero. They start bailing out, however, when they look at the costs.

There were 89 Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, and 54 of them, fully 60 percent, met with unnatural deaths: assassination, death in battle, suicide under duress, etc. Moreover, at least 74 would-be emperors tried to seize the purple, failed, and died violently. In the chaotic decades of the third century, the emperor Gallienus alone vanquished 19 challengers before the 20th beat him.

Given the hazards of imperial power, why were there so many candidates for the job? The simple answer is that the Romans were ruled by men who preferred a short and dangerous life crowned by glory to a long and safe life lived in obscurity.

Note also that the glory these men were willing to risk everything for was quite conventional. Often their only accomplishment was to scramble to the top of the political hierarchy. Few could be called saviors of their people or civilization.

So what has changed? I don’t think that human nature has fundamentally changed, but human values have. Modern men simply prefer long, comfortable, and private lives to risking death in the pursuit of glory.

Last year I gave a speech on this topic at the American Renaissance conference. The title was “Our Sacred Honor.” My argument was that when the 56 American revolutionaries who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to the cause of liberty, that meant they were willing to lose their lives and fortunes but not their honor. That’s what made it sacred. They were rebelling against the king because he did not give them the respect they felt due as free men.

That’s the ethos of a revolutionary. That’s the ethos we need to cultivate. We need to make a cult of honor: specifically, loyalty to our people and their cause.

For the ancients, a free man was willing to risk life and fortune in the struggle for honor. They regarded those who refused that risk as slaves by nature, because they would endure degradation to preserve their safety and comfort.

You aren’t really free if you don’t know what your options are. Yet most people are blissfully unaware of this choice. They think that standing up against evil can ruin their lives, but what they really mean is their economic lives. They don’t understand that submitting to evil can ruin their lives as well. Namely, it can corrupt their souls.

I believe that if we make people see that they have this fundamental choice, more of them might choose to be heroes.

But there’s a problem with honor and glory. These are public things. They are bestowed by others. But, as my friend Wilhem Ivorsson put it: How many people in the movement today would stick with it if they were told that yes, we are going to win, but nobody will remember your name?

This points to a motive for doing the right thing that is even more sublime than honor, namely duty. When the dutiful man learns what is right, he doesn’t need any further incentive to act—not honor, not pleasure, not happiness. He never thinks, “Yes, it is the right thing to do, but what’s in it for me?” He never thinks “Will I be remembered?” but only “Will I be worthy of being remembered?”

The best possible life is to enjoy honor, glory, and personal happiness perfectly apportioned to one’s worth. They are the crown of moral worth, but only the crown, the reward but not the merit. Sometimes we are forced to choose: between reward and merit, between happiness and worthiness of happiness, between glory and worthiness of glory.

What makes us worthy of happiness and glory is doing the right thing, regardless of the consequences. When faced with the choice between moral worth and its rewards, we can choose to be worthy, or we can choose the crown without the worthiness to wear it. We can choose to be unsung heroes or the frauds who wear their laurels. Which type do you choose to be?

In a heroic task such as ours, duty-driven men are far more reliable than the seekers of glory. Such men can move worlds. They are rocks, over which the waves of history break impotently and foam with rage. But they may remain entirely invisible and unsung. You may pass them in the street every day. But the only one you may ever meet is the one that you create in the privacy of your own soul.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/eternal-glory/

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is both the smartest politician in Europe and, from my point of view, the most ideologically sound. Thus it came as a big surprise that he was soundly trounced in last Sunday’s elections. Why did this happen, and what does it bode for Hungary and for the nationalist-populist Right more broadly?

Orbán lost because of bad luck, which he could not control, and bad decisions, which he could control.

Orbán’s bad luck was simply that Hungary is a small, land-locked country. Hungary was devastated by the Second World War, followed by more than 40 years of Communism. After Communism, Hungary saw many of its most educated people go abroad for higher wages. It quickly became economically dependent on Western Europe, especially Germany, which is hell-bent on self-destruction: liberalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, Green energy, migration, de-industrialization, Covid hysteria, etc.

Orbán actually managed to benefit from some elements of Western decline. But Covid was an inflection point. Western Covid policies were luxury beliefs that Hungary could ill-afford. Hungary has suffered from high inflation and economic stagnation, largely due to Covid, exacerbated by the fact that the European Union withheld billions in Covid relief subsidies because they didn’t like Orbán’s sensible social conservatism and sound policies on sovereignty, migration, and identity. Even if Orbán did everything else right, he might have lost because of this.

So what did Orbán do wrong?

First of all, it is never good for a nationalist to identify too closely with the nationalisms — and national interests — of other nations. Yet Orbán was seen as sycophantic to Trump, Netanyahu, and above all Putin, to the point of compromising Hungarian national interests. Of course, a good statesman seeks good relations with other countries, but there is a clear, bright line between diplomacy and treason: namely, the interests of one’s own people.

All of Hungary’s Right-wing populists share a very unpopular idea. They are pro-Russian in a nation that widely despises Russians, not just for 1956 or 1944–45, but for 1849. Hungarians have long historical memories. It would be easy to dismiss such attitudes as mere “historical grievances,” but “the past is prologue,” and Russian imperialism is obviously not dead.

Whether they are right or wrong, Hungarian pro-Putin populists are taking an unpopulist stance. But maybe they have good reasons. The best reason is that it is important to be friendly with Russia as a geopolitical counterweight to America and the EU. But, again, the operative criterion should be Hungary’s national interests.

Beyond that, pro-Russian attitudes in Hungary are largely rooted in the same witless “Russia stronk” memes and delusions about Russia being a stronghold of white, conservative values so common in the Western far-Right. And wherever these memes appear, Russian financial corruption is never far away.

It was easy for Hungarians to overlook this as a minor eccentricity until the Ukraine War. Most Hungarians don’t particularly care for Ukraine, largely because they fret for a tiny Hungarian minority in Ukraine trapped behind borders drawn by Stalin. But the vast majority of Hungarians are pleased that Russia is far away from their borders, and Ukraine just happens to be the country that is keeping them away.

Thus, to “normie” Hungarians, it seems the height of perversity for Hungarian nationalists to parrot all the pro-Russian propaganda tropes on the Ukraine War: NATO encroachment, “poke the bear,” the “Maidan coup,” etc. It is easy to understand why people far from Russia repeat these memes. But in Hungary or Poland, they seem so perverse, eccentric, and detached from reality that the mind is naturally drawn to explanations like bribery and treason. This is why, when Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar, celebrated his victory last Sunday, the crowd was chanting “Ruszkik Haza!” “Russians go home!”

Orbán’s recent reelection campaign struck me as perverse. For a long time, Orbán’s face was nowhere to be seen. Instead, most Fidesz posters featured Zelensky, Ursula von der Leyen, and Péter Magyar.

To make matters worse, the Fidesz election slogan, “A biztos választás,” simply means “The Safe Choice.” Not the ideal choice, not the best choice. It hardly conveyed self-confidence.

Late in the campaign, Orbán’s face finally appeared along with the Hungarian national colors. He’s gotten rather fat, but they managed to find a flattering, statesmanlike semi-profile. His new slogan, “Fogjunk össze a háború ellen” means “Let’s unite against the war,” meaning the Ukraine War, meaning unite against helping Ukraine, which basically means: let’s reward Russian aggression. What do conservatives say happens when you reward a behavior? You get more of it. Was this really the best he could come up with? Why finish a campaign by doubling down on an unpopular issue that should have been concealed like an idiot child? It really does smack of putting Russia’s interests not just ahead of Hungary’s but even ahead of Orbán’s own interests.

The populists who are freaking out about Orbán’s defeat need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask themselves whether they are setting themselves up for the same failure. The Western populist Right has been deeply corrupted by Russian propaganda and outright bribery. Once more, there is nothing wrong with wanting to have good relations with Russia. But that’s because it is in one’s own national interest. Any hint of promoting Russian interests ahead of one’s own homeland is treason and should be political suicide. That’s a high price to pay for sniggering over stupid memes. The whole populist Right needs a “Russians go home!” policy.

Orbán also had the bad luck to roll out this slogan after America and Israel started the Iran War. Orbán opposed this war too, in a sensible and diplomatic way. But this was undermined when J. D. Vance showed up in Budapest to campaign for Orbán while Trump was melting down on social media.

Hungarians regard Jews, even Jewish Hungarians, as a distinct ethnic group with distinct interests. This attitude is completely independent of whether they like or dislike Jews. But even Hungarians who aren’t particularly fond of Jews are generally polite and cordial to their Jewish neighbors. Orbán, however, goes far beyond that.

Like Trump, Orbán is particularly cozy with Netanyahu, even after his utterly barbaric treatment of Gaza. In fact, when the International Criminal Court indicted Netanyahu for war crimes in 2024, Orbán withdrew Hungary from the court and rolled out the red carpet for Netanyahu to visit Hungary in 2025.

Recently, Orbán boasted that Hungary will have the largest Jewish community in Europe someday, because Jews will move there to escape anti-Semitism. So, migration and the Great Replacement are okay, as long as they are done by Jews.

Again, to a “normie” Hungarian who may have no particular animus against Jews and Israel, such policies still smack of putting another nation’s interests first — not just before Hungary’s national interests but before Orbán’s personal political interests as well. Such self-defeating sycophancy is all too familiar to Americans watching the Trump administration committing suicide at Netanyahu’s request.

And this brings us to the Trump Question.

One of Orbán’s best traits is that he understands metapolitics. One of his best metapolitical initiatives has been to promote Hungarian-style national populism to Western conservatives. This is moving the “Overton window” in the Right direction. The Danube Institute and CPAC Hungary have been particularly effective outreach projects.

But influence is a two-way street, and there has been a strong backwash of Trumpian style “slopulism” into Hungary. Since nothing says “America First” like fawning over Israeli war criminals, the recent CPAC Hungary conference was to feature Netanyahu as a guest of honor. Unfortunately, he was detained by launching another genocide. I was also disturbed to see American flags being waved at CPAC Hungary. Again, this looks like putting another country first, even to Hungarians who are strongly pro-American. As a Yankee, the first words that came to my mind were “Jenkik haza!”

Orbán’s second problem was “corruption.” Hungary isn’t a particularly corrupt society, even by the ratings of a biased organization like Transparency International, which gives Hungary a 40/100 rating, whereas the United States has 65/100. Hungary is ranked 84 out of 182 countries worldwide, tied with Cuba.

Of course, all this depends on how one defines corruption. I define it as a public servant putting one’s personal interests or foreign interests ahead of the common good. I do not, however, think that political “patronage,” i.e., giving concrete benefits to one’s political supporters is necessarily corrupt. But it all depends on how that patronage is used.

Just a few years ago, Hungary was stunned by a genuinely evil and stupid Fidesz patronage scandal.

In 2019, one “János V.,” the director of a state-run orphanage, was sentenced to prison for sexually abusing boys. One of his underlings, Endre Konya, was also sentenced to prison for attempting to coerce victims to drop their accusations. Konya comes from a Calvinist family, and asked the Calvinist bishop, Zoltán Balog, for a little favor. Balog was the mentor of Katalin Novák, the Fidesz President of Hungary. Konya had nine months left of his sentence. But he did not want to wait. He wanted a pardon. He also wanted his record expunged, which apparently would also wipe out . . . a five-year ban on working with children.

Astonishingly, Novák saw no problem with this. So she and Justice Minister Judit Varga cooked up a pardon. In a surreal touch, he was pardoned along with 21 other criminals . . . in honor of Pope Francis’ visit to Budapest in 2023.

In 2024, an opposition journalist discovered the scandal. Orbán knew nothing about the pardon and was as outraged as the rest of the country. Novák and Varga were forced to resign for colossal political stupidity.

I don’t want to be “that guy,” but I can’t help wondering if these women were really the best candidates for their jobs, or if Orbán was playing the typical American conservative game of pandering to progressives by promoting “our minorities” beyond their level of competence.

Judit Varga especially is the gift that keeps on giving, for her ex-husband is none other than Péter Magyar, Hungary’s new Prime Minister.

Third and finally, Orbán allowed Magyar to outflank him on his signature issue, namely immigration. Orbán has brought a lot of jobs to Hungary by luring companies like Mercedes Benz, Samsung, and BYD (Build Your Dreams), China’s largest EV maker, to build factories there.

Unfortunately, not all these jobs are going to Hungarians. Orbán is importing guest workers from places like the Philippines, some of which are being housed in small villages in Fidesz’s stronghold, the Hungarian countryside. This was asking for trouble.

Hungarian liberals are surprisingly “based.” Thus I was not totally surprised last year when a liberal Budapest urbanite began complaining that, when he and a friend got on a bus in the Hungarian countryside, they were the only white people onboard. Magyar probably sewed up a lot of rural votes when he promised to send Orbán’s guest workers back.

National populists in every white country need to learn from these mistakes. I am pretty sure that Orbán will learn from them as well. Barring prosecution or a change in the Hungarian constitution, I hope Orbán will return — tan, rested, and hopefully a bit thinner — in 2030.

I have no idea what Péter Magyar really believes. Just as it is foolish to dislike Ukraine because libtards cheer for it, so too is it foolish to conclude that Magyar is bad because liberals are cheering for him. After all, these people are stupid enough to call Orbán a dictator.

I also have no idea how Magyar will actually govern. His Tisza party is a coalition of widely divergent tendencies, from Right and Left. He will have to govern his own party first before he can govern the nation. My hope is that Fidesz will side with him on sensible reforms and will be able to block anything foolish by wooing Tisza defectors to their side. The prospect of Orbán’s return in four years — or a new Fidesz standard-bearer — will also limit Magyar.

I am predicting, however, that Magyar will soon disappoint the Eurocrats, for the same reason that even without Orbán, “Orbánism” will continue to rise in Hungary and the rest of the white world: national populism is the only solution for the problems of liberalism, migration, and globalization.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/goodbye-mr-orban/

Many patriotic Americans object to White Nationalism because they are told it is “un-American.” America, they say, was always a multiracial society, dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Therefore, the White Nationalist idea of a society that bases citizenship on race is alien to the American tradition.

This viewpoint is false, based on a systematic misrepresentation of American history.

First of all, the claim that the United States is dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” is simply untrue. The phrase “all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Whatever the intended meaning of this rhetorical flourish, its author, Thomas Jefferson, and many of the signatories, evidently did not think it was inconsistent with owning Negro slaves. In fact, “all men are created equal” was simply the rejection of the principle of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy known as “republicanism.” The intended meaning, however, is moot because the Declaration may well be an important historical document, but it is not a legal document of the United States.

The Constitution of the United States was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and went into effect in 1789. It contains not a word about universal human equality, but it does prohibit a hereditary aristocracy. The Preamble makes it clear that the Constitution was created and ratified by white men to provide good government for themselves and their posterity, not all of mankind. The Constitution treats Indians as foreign nations, allows Negro slavery, and defines free and enslaved blacks as non-citizens, each one counting as only three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Congressional representation.

The claim that America is “dedicated to the proposition” of human equality comes from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which, like the Declaration, is a fine piece of rhetoric, but it is not a legal document of the United States either. Lincoln’s claim that America is dedicated to the “proposition” of equality is the epitome of the Left-wing revisionist tradition in America, which has taken a line from the Declaration, inflated it with a great deal of rhetorical hot air, and set it up as the first and final commandment of an egalitarian civil religion. This civil religion has no constitutional basis. But that has proved to be no impediment. A piece of paper still remains enshrined in Washington, D.C. But the Constitution’s inegalitarian, particularist, and libertarian order has simply been replaced with a Jacobin-style state committed to realizing the idea of universal human equality.

Second, the claim that America was always a multiracial society—with whites, American Indians, and blacks present from the start of English colonization—is fundamentally false. From the beginning of the colonial period well into the history of the United States, there was a consensus that blacks and American Indians—and later mestizos and Orientals—might be “in” white society, but they were not “of” it. They were foreigners, not fellow citizens. They had no say about the character and destiny of white society.

The colonial consensus that blacks and Indians were not part of white society was reflected in the Constitution. It was further elaborated in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which defined who could become a citizen of the United States. Naturalization was limited to free white persons of good character. This excluded American Indians, indentured servants, free and enslaved blacks, Muslims, and later Orientals.

From the start, American Indians were considered distinct, sovereign nations. American Indians who did not live on reservations could become citizens only with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Citizenship was granted to all American Indians only by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. To this day, however, most Indians in effect enjoy dual citizenship, since they belong to tribes which still have special rights granted to them by treaties with the US government.

Blacks, whether slaves or free, were not considered to be part of white society in the colonial period or under the Constitution until the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868. The Naturalization Act of 1870 allowed foreign-born blacks, primarily from other parts of the Americas, to become US citizens.

Chinese immigrants began arriving in the 1840s, and their presence almost immediately created a backlash. White Americans objected to Chinese economic competition, drug use, criminality, and all-round alienness.

Soon an Asian exclusion movement arose to cut off Chinese immigration and freeze the Chinese out of American society. The vanguard of Chinese exclusion came from the labor movement, which saw that big business interests were importing coolies to depress white wages and living standards. California was the front line of the Chinese invasion and the white reaction, which was often violent. The Chinese exclusion movement was led by the California Workingmen’s Party, founded by Irish immigrant Denis Kearney, who obviously didn’t fall for the idea that all immigrants are equal.^[1]

Because of exclusionist agitation, Chinese immigration was reduced, then completely barred for ten years by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was renewed in 1892 and again in 1902 and extended to people from Hawaii and the Philippines. Chinese exclusion was again reaffirmed by the Immigration Act of 1924. Chinese born in America were not considered citizens until 1898, and it was only in 1940 that naturalization was opened to people of Chinese, Philippine, and East Indian descent, as well as descendants of the aboriginal peoples from other parts of the Western Hemisphere, meaning Indians and mestizos from outside the United States. Chinese exclusion was only overturned by Congress in 1943, as a wartime gesture toward China.

But even with all of these concessions to non-whites, US immigration and naturalization law was explicitly committed to maintaining an overwhelming white majority until the 1965 Immigration Act threw open America’s borders to race-replacement immigration from the Third World.

The 1965 Immigration Act, like the long history of extending citizenship to non-whites that came before it, was imposed by political elites against the will of the white majority. Such measures would never have been approved if the public had been allowed to vote on them in referendums.

Furthermore, extending legal citizenship to non-whites did not in any way alter the deep conviction that real Americans are white, and the naturalization of non-whites came with the expectation that they would live according to white norms. Non-white citizens faced numerous forms of legal and social discrimination, subordination, and segregation well into the 20th century.

Thus, although it is true to say that non-whites have always existed within the borders of what we now call America, throughout most of American history, they have been excluded from citizenship or consigned to second-class citizenship and forced to conform to white cultural norms.

The American tradition of excluding and subordinating non-whites is, of course, portrayed as violent, evil, irrational, petty, and mean-spirited by our education system and culture industry, which are firmly in the hands of the Left. But Americans had their reasons. They recognized that race is real, that the races are different, and that different races are more comfortable in different forms of society. They recognized that any attempt to incorporate non-whites into American society will result in conflict as non-whites demand that white society accommodate them, and whites push back to protect their own way of life. In short, they knew all along precisely what White Nationalists—and white Americans in general—are now learning from bitter experience from the failure of egalitarianism, racial integration, and non-white immigration.

If, dear reader, you truly are an American patriot, if you take your bearings from the American Founding (the real Founding—the Constitution—not the egalitarian afflatus that has replaced it), then it behooves you to learn something about what the founders and subsequent generations of statesmen and sages actually thought about race. I suggest you begin with Jared Taylor’s classic article, “What the Founders Really Thought About Race.”^[2] I also suggest that you pick up S. T. Joshi’s Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke,^[3] which documents a long and illustrious tradition of American race realism, as well as its editor’s Left-wing prejudices.

Even many White Nationalists are surprised to learn how sensible earlier generations of Americans were. This makes America’s reversal and decline all the more shocking, but ultimately it is cause for hope, for it reveals deep foundations upon which we can build. Far from being “un-American,” White Nationalism is actually the legitimate heir of the healthiest strands of the American tradition.

But unlike previous generations of race realists, who were confused by commitments to classical liberalism, corrupted by the allure of the cheap-labor plantation economy, and too easily contented with half-measures that ultimately failed to preserve America for their posterity, White Nationalists aim at a permanent solution: the repatriation of post-1965 immigrant populations and the partition of the United States into racially homogeneous homelands.

Counter-Currents, April 17, 2017

[1] See Theodore J. O’Keefe’s “Denis Kearney and the Struggle for a White America,” Counter-Currents, February 1, 2001, and Raymond T. Wolters, “Race War on the Pacific Coast,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2008).

[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/252361377/What-the-Founders-Really-Thought-About-Race

[3] S. T. Joshi’s Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

A lot of people are down in the dumps because of Trump’s shocking betrayals on immigration, the Epstein files, and especially the expanding debacle in Iran. Here are a few words of consolation. Things aren’t that bad.

As a White Nationalist, my political goal is to restore white homelands ravaged by globalization, low white fertility, and non-white migration. Our ranks are steadily growing, but we remain a political minority. Until we are no longer a minority and have the power to implement our preferred policies, we must content ourselves with influencing existing parties to adopt policies we like.

Our natural political constituency is white people who vote for center-Right parties, especially nationalists and populists, as opposed to globalists and neoliberal elitists. Such politicians include Viktor Orbán, Georgia Meloni, and Donald Trump.

One shouldn’t expect too much of such politicians. They only want some of the things we want, and frankly they’d be horrified by the rest. Moreover, they will speak to and make deals with our enemies, but they will barely acknowledge our existence. We can dispense with them once we have power. But until that time, they’re the best we have.

Orbán is by far the best of the lot. Meloni is the biggest disappointment. Trump is a very mixed bag. He has done many things we would do if we had power: restrict immigration, ramp up deportations, and roll back anti-white discrimination.

But Trump’s megalomaniacal foreign policy blunders, including two wars on Iran at Israeli behest, have wrecked vital alliances, sent the global economy into a tailspin, and shredded the electoral coalition needed to perpetuate his policies. At this point, it seems almost certain that the Left will return to power and reverse everything good he accomplished.

It’s all very depressing.

But I want you to notice something about the political scenario above. The agents are the Left, the center-Right, and mainstream national populist politicians. We can also add in the Jewish lobby, the oligarchy, and various foreign powers.

But where do we fit in this picture? Apparently, we’re just helpless, passive spectators. If that’s how we see ourselves, no wonder so many people are depressed. It feels bad to be helpless and passive.

But there’s another way to look at this. We’re not mere spectators. We’re agents here. And we’re not powerless either. Now, I will grant that building White Nationalism with no money and no power is much harder than having it handed to us by others. But, (1) people who don’t want White Nationalism were never going to deliver it anyway, so even if they gave us a good head start, the greater part of the work was still going to be ours, and (2) taking stock of what we can do and making a plan to do it is better than moping around and feeling powerless and hopeless.

The Ancient Stoics taught that there are things you can control, and there are things you can’t. The first step toward wisdom is discerning the difference. White Nationalists have very little control over the world, because we lack numbers, money, and political power.

But we have a lot of control over our attitudes and expectations. If you want things that you can’t have, you are bound to be defeated. Unrealistic expectations are a major source of disappointment. And disappointment is one of the main impediments to discovering the things you can control and expanding your power over them.

There’s a strange phenomenon on the Right that I call “Imaginary Friend Syndrome.” I first noticed it in 2008 when White Nationalists convinced themselves that Ron Paul was a secret friend. “Ron Paul gets the JQ. That’s what’s really behind his anti-interventionism.” Then, four years later, Ron Paul was back and Mitt Romney joined the Secret Friend Club: “Look at Romney’s cranial index. Look at his big, beautiful family. Look at his ‘power point.’”

I mocked this at the time, but it has only gotten worse.

The biggest and most baleful examples of Imaginary Friend Syndrome on the Right today are the Based Putin/Based Russia crowd and QAnon. QAnon didn’t just imagine Trump was our guy. It sold millions of people on the idea that Trump had a whole team of Superfriends fighting alongside him against the “Deep State.”

I believe Imaginary Friend Syndrome is a coping mechanism for dealing with a feeling of powerlessness. But you don’t gain power from deluding yourself. It is fun to imagine that you have friends in high places. But you can only gain power from a cold, objective look at reality.

If you imagined—even slightly, even for a minute—that Trump is our friend, you were setting yourself up for needless disappointment. So pull that disappointment up by the roots.

Trump isn’t a White Nationalist. He was never a White Nationalist. That was never going to happen. He wants some of what we want in the short term. But he doesn’t have a long-term vision of society, and if he bothered to articulate it, it would be a happy rainbow in which minorities act white and grateful, like something from eighties sitcoms and buddy movies. He’d be horrified by the idea of restoring white homelands. Ultimately, only White Nationalists can create White Nationalism, because only we want it.

It would be easier if you are like me and regard Trump coldly, simply as a tool. (And let’s face it, that’s how he regards us.)

At best, he was a tool implementing policies that we would have implemented, thus giving us a taste of victory long before we actually attain power.

Barring that, Trump is at the very least—to quote Charles Murray—our “murder weapon” against the American political establishment.

Even if all Trump’s positive achievements as president are erased, his greatest gift to us may have happened on that day in 2015 when he announced his candidacy. In a single stroke, he changed the parameters of American politics by questioning the value of unrestrained economic globalization and Third World migration. Millions of Americans, overwhelmingly white, were being harmed by these policies. But their complaints were ignored by the political establishment until Trump came along.

The reigning policies in a society are the ones you don’t get to vote on, because they are embraced by the whole political establishment. Trump was hailed as a tribune of the people and denounced as a traitor to his class because he broke ranks on globalization and immigration. Trump opened a space in American politics for nationalism, populism, and white identity politics. He proved that it is a winning formula.

That’s the sense in which Trump was a murder weapon against the political establishment. And, as any wise guy will tell you, once you use a murder weapon, you need to drop it and walk away.

Establishment Republicans would very much like to go back to business as usual, but that won’t happen, for three reasons:

1. “Business as usual” is destroying America. Once Trump is gone, multiculturalism won’t magically start working. Liberalism, globalism, open borders, and pandering to crazies, criminals, and morons won’t make society better. More business as usual just means more destruction. More destruction means more people searching for credible solutions. And that’s where we come in. We have the solutions. The failures of the system—globalization, multiculturalism, anti-whiteness, immigration—are the primary forces driving the rise of white identity politics. If the system intensifies these policies, they will intensify the reaction, which would be us. And now we can add Trump’s betrayals to the list of factors driving people toward us.

2. The other main factor driving the rise of white identity politics is that we are converting people to our way of thinking. We are winning the battle of ideas. This can be measured by opinion polls, electoral shifts, and web traffic to alternative sites. There are more people getting into the fight every day, and not just passive consumers of “content” but creators and activists.

3. Whether from principle, opportunism, or some blend of both, new national populist politicians are emerging who understand identitarian issues far better than Trump or Nigel Farage. Rupert Lowe in the UK is the best example. J. D. Vance is an even better example, because he is a heartbeat from the US presidency already. But that’s a hard thesis to sell in the current climate. Vance may be too tainted by association with Trump. He may have “played the game” too well with the ruling powers. So it may be a foolish use of my social capital to plead his case.

In sum, Trump was not our last hope. I wish he had done more for us as president. I hope the good things he has done won’t be reversed because his stupidity will return the Left to power. But the best thing he has done for us—creating a political space for nationalism and populism—will not be undone.

The rest is up to us. But it has always been up to us. In the end, only White Nationalists will save our race, because we’re the only people who want that. And there are more of us every day. New and more receptive political figures are emerging, and many more are to come.

Yes, the system still has enormous advantages in terms of guns and money, but truth and justice are on our side, and ultimately those matter more.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/184790/

Libertarianism is the politics of individualism. Individualism is both a metaphysical and a moral position.

Metaphysical individualism is the thesis that only particular men exist. Groups are just collections of individuals, with no independent reality or meaning.

Metaphysical individualism is connected to universalism, which is the idea that there is only one race, the human race, which is just a collection of individuals. Universalism implies that there is no meaningful distinction between ingroups and outgroups, between us and them.

Universalism has two important implications.

First, since politics as Carl Schmitt defines it arises from the distinction between us and them, universalism implies that politics is merely a temporary phenomenon, based on the waning illusion of meaningful distinctions between ingroups and outgroups. When these distinctions disappear, politics will as well.

Second, nationalism, patriotism, and any other form of partiality for one’s ingroup over an outgroup is morally illegitimate, since there is really no us and them, just me and you. This leads us to the ethical dimension of individualism. How do you and I get on together? If groups are just collections of individuals, there are no group values, just individual values. The purpose of social institutions, therefore, is to facilitate individuals pursuing their own aims.

The great facilitator of individuals pursuing their aims is capitalism. If you and I have something to offer each other, we might trade. If we have nothing to offer each other, we just walk on by. The marketplace requires only a minimal “nightwatchman” state to protect us against force, fraud, breach of contract, and the like.

Ethical individualism requires us to treat individuals as individuals, not as members of various morally unimportant groups handed to us by history or nature. We must be “blind” to race. We must be “blind” to class. We must be “blind” to sex. We must be “blind” to religion. We must be “blind” to nationality. We must be “blind” to all things that divide us. The only thing we must see are individual merits.

The individualism game is highly advantageous for all players. Individualism unleashes creativity in science, technology, and business. But paradoxically, the greatest strength of individualism is the form of cooperation it fosters. Each individualist comports himself as a member of a potentially global society. This means that social cooperation can scale up to the global limit as well, making possible the wholesale transformation of the world we call modernity.

Collectivist societies, however, are hampered by ingroup/outgroup splits. If people behave as members of groups, trust and cooperation are confined to ingroups, which severely constricts the scale of social institutions and corrupts their functioning with favoritism toward ingroups and discrimination toward outgroups.

In honest contests, the individualist game can outcompete the collectivist game, which is why individualistic European societies conquered virtually the entire globe with superior technologies and forms of social cooperation.

But the competition for global domination is rarely honest. Thus when Western individualist societies conquered and absorbed collectivist ones, it was only a matter of time before the more intelligent tribes learned how to cheat.

How does one cheat an individualist? By pretending to be an individualist while working as a member of a group. You demand that individualists give you a fair shake in every transaction. But whenever possible, you give preferences to members of your own tribe, and they give preferences to you.

Imagine playing a game of cards in which your opponent can play a wild card but you can’t. That wild card is their tribal membership. It does not matter how great an advantage you might have over him in terms of chips at the start, because the rules give him a systematic advantage, and as long as you play the game, you will lose. But individualists are slow to catch on to the scam, because they are blind to groups.

It is interesting that the most important founder of modern race- and nation-blind individualism was Ayn Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum, and the leadership of her Objectivist movement just happened to be overwhelmingly Jewish, including a number of first cousins and married couples. Obviously, this was not individualist meritocracy in action. Yet Rand’s followers were blind to this fact as a matter of high moral principle.

There will never be a libertarian society. But libertarian ideology still performs a function within the existing system. And although libertarianism is superficially opposed to the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, both are Jewish intellectual movements that perform the same function: They break down the resistance of high-trust, European individualist societies to duplicitous tribal groups—what John Robb calls “parasite tribes”—preeminently Jews. Libertarians preach individualism, whereas the Frankfurt School stigmatizes white ethnocentrism and extols “inclusiveness” toward “marginalized” groups. But the result is the same. Both doctrines promote Jewish upward mobility and collective power while blinding the rest of society to what is happening.

What kind of people preach blindness as a virtue? People who are up to no good.

Ultimately, I would argue, individualism is a product of the biological and cultural evolution of European man. Individualism goes hand in hand with low ethnocentrism, i.e., openness to strangers, the universalist idea that ultimately there is just one group, humanity, to which we all belong. The European mentality was beautifully encapsulated in a saying of Will Rogers: “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met.” I doubt very much that an equivalent phrase can be found in Hebrew or Arabic. In other words, there is fundamentally no us and them. There is just knowledge and ignorance, friends we know and friends we don’t.

This openness is highly advantageous because it allows us to increase the number of people with whom trust and cooperation are possible. But openness to strangers is also risky, of course, because they might not reciprocate. Thus taking the risk of sociability—extending the hand of friendship—is deeply ingrained in our sense of moral high-mindedness. But when we meet people who do not reciprocate our openness, but instead regard it as a weakness to be exploited, then our virtues are no longer advantageous, and if our elites persist in high-minded openness to such enemies, they must be relieved of their powers and responsibilities.

Individualism blinds its followers to collectivist cheats. Thus the only way to save individualism is to become aware of groups. But that sounds like collectivism. Once we become aware of parasite tribes, we have to exclude them. But that sounds like statism. If individualism is ultimately a European ethos, then individualism requires that we preserve European societies and exclude non-Europeans, which sounds like racial nationalism.

This is the refutation of libertarianism. It is a form of self-refutation. To save individualism, we have to repudiate universalism, reintroduce the distinction between us and them, and start acting collectively. Individualism only works as part of a collective of like-minded people who must exclude collectives that don’t play by the same rules. This is how some people start out as libertarian individualists and become racists, anti-Semites, and fascists in the end.

Counter-Currents, October 20, 2015

The idea of creating a utopian society through scientific and technological progress goes back to such founders of modern philosophy as Bacon and Descartes, although the idea was already hinted at by Machiavelli. But today, most people’s visions of technological utopia are derived from science fiction. With the notable exception of Frank Herbert’s Dune series,[1] science fiction tends to identify progress with political liberalism and globalism. Just think of Star Trek, in which the liberal, multi-racial Federation is constantly battling against perennial evils like nationalism and eugenics. Thus it is worth asking: Is ethnic nationalism—which is illiberal and anti-globalist—compatible with technological utopianism or not?

My view is that technological utopianism is not only compatible with ethnic nationalism but also that liberalism and globalization undermine technological progress, and that the ethnostate is actually the ideal incubator for mankind’s technological apotheosis.

Before arguing these points, however, I need to say a bit about what technological utopianism entails and why people think it is a natural fit with globalization. The word utopia literally means nowhere and designates a society that cannot be realized. But the progress of science and technology are all about the conquest of nature, i.e., the expansion of man’s power and reach, so that utopia becomes attainable. Specific ambitions of scientific utopianism include the abolition of material scarcity, the exploration and settlement of the galaxy, the prolongation of human life, and the upward evolution of the human species.

It is natural to think that scientific and technological progress go hand-in-hand with globalization. Reality is one, therefore the science that understands reality and the technology that manipulates it must be one as well. Science and technology speak a universal language. They are cumulative collaborative enterprises that can mobilize the contributions of the best people from across the globe. So it seems reasonable that the road to technological utopia can only be impeded by national borders. I shall offer three arguments why this is not so.

1. Globalization vs. Innovation

I define globalization as breaking down barriers to sameness: the same market, the same culture, the same form of government, the same way of life—what Alexandre Kojève called the “universal homogeneous state.”

As Peter Thiel argues persuasively in Zero to One, globalization and technological innovation are actually two very different modes of progress.[2] Technological innovation creates something new. Globalization merely copies new things and spreads them around. Thiel argues, furthermore, that globalization without technological innovation is not sustainable. For instance, it is simply not possible for China and India to consume as much fossil fuel as the First World countries, but that is entailed by globalization within the present technological context. In the short run, this sort of globalization will have catastrophic environmental effects. In the long run, it will hasten the day when our present form of civilization collapses when fossil fuels are exhausted. To stave off this apocalypse, we need new innovations, particularly in the area of energy.

The most important technological innovations of the 20th century are arguably splitting the atom and the conquest of space. Neither was accomplished by private enterprise spurred by consumer demand in a global liberal-democratic society. Instead, they were created by rival governments locked in hot and cold warfare: first the United States and its Allies against the Axis powers in World War II, then the United States and the capitalist West versus the Soviet Bloc until the collapse of Communism in 1989–1991.

Indeed, one can argue that the rivalry between capitalism and communism began to lose its technological dynamism because of the statesmanship of Richard Nixon, who began détente with the USSR with the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in 1969, then went to China in 1971, lessening the threat that the Communist powers would recoalesce into a single bloc. Détente ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have spurred major technological advances, but merely threatening it was enough to persuade Gorbachev to seek a political solution. So the ideal situation for spurring technological growth is political rivalry without political resolution, thereby necessitating immense expenditures on research and development to gain technological advantages.

Since the collapse of Communism and the rise of a unipolar liberal-democratic world order, however, the driving force of technological change has been consumer demand. Atomic energy and sending men into space have been pretty much abandoned, and technological progress has been primarily channeled into information technology, which has made some of us more productive but for the most part just allows us to amuse ourselves with smartphones as society declines around us.

But we are not going to be able to Tweet ourselves out of looming environmental crises and Malthusian traps. Only fundamental innovations in energy technology will do the trick. And only the state, which can command enormous resources and unite a society around a common purpose, has a record of accomplishment in this area.

Of course none of the parties to the great conflicts that spurred technological growth were ethnonationalists in the strict sense, not even the Axis powers. Indeed, liberal democracy and communism were merely rival visions of global society. But when rival visions of globalization are slugging it out for power, that means that the globe is divided among a plurality of different political actors.

Pluralism and rivalry have spurred states to the greatest technological advances in history. Globalization, pacification, and liberalism have not only halted progress but have bred complacency in the face of potential global disasters. A global marketplace will never take mankind to the stars. It will simply distract us until civilization collapses and the Earth becomes a scorched boneyard.

2. Innovation vs. Cost-Cutting

In economics, productivity is defined as a mathematical formula: outputs divided by inputs, i.e., the cost per widget. Mathematically speaking, you can increase productivity either by making labor more productive, chiefly through technological innovation, or simply by cutting costs.

Most of the productivity gains that come from economic globalization are a matter of cost-cutting, primarily cutting the costs of labor. The Third World has a vast supply of cheap labor. Economic globalization allows the free movement of labor and capital. Businesses can cut labor costs by moving factories overseas or by importing new workers to drive down wages at home.

Historically speaking, the greatest economic spur to technological innovation has been high labor costs. The way to raise labor costs is to end economic globalization,[3] by cutting off immigration and by putting high tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In short, we need economic nationalism. Indeed, only economic nationalism can lead to a post-scarcity economy.

What exactly is a “post-scarcity economy,” and how can we get there from here? First of all, not all forms of scarcity can be abolished. Unique and handcrafted items will always be scarce. There will only be one Mona Lisa. Scarcity can only be abolished with identical, mass-produced items. Second, the cost of these items will only approach zero in terms of labor. Basically, we will arrive at a post-scarcity economy when machines put everyone involved in mass production out of work. But the machines, raw materials, and energy used in production will still have some costs. Thus the post-scarcity economy will arrive through innovation in robotics and energy production. The best image of a post-scarcity world is the “replicator” in Star Trek, which can change the atomic structure of basic inputs to materialize things out of thin air.

Of course workers who are replaced by machines can’t be allowed to starve. The products of machines have to be consumed by someone. Production can be automated but consumption cannot. It would be an absurdist dystopia if mechanization led to the starvation of workers, so consumption had to be automated as well. One set of robots would produce things, then another set of robots would consume them and add zeroes to the bank balances of a few lonely plutocrats.

To make the post-scarcity economy work, we need to ensure that people can afford to buy its products. There are two basic ways this can be done.

First, the productivity gains of capital have to be shared with the workers, through rising wages or shrinking work weeks. When workers are eliminated entirely, they need to receive generous pensions.

Second, every economic system requires a medium of exchange. Under the present system, the state gives private banks the ability to create money and charge interest on its use. The state also provides a whole range of direct payments to individuals: welfare, old-age pensions, etc. A universal basic income is a direct government payment to all citizens that is sufficient to ensure basic survival in a First World country.[4] Such an income would allow the state to ensure economic liquidity, so that every product has a buyer, while eliminating two very costly middlemen: banks and social welfare bureaucracies.

All of this sounds pretty far out. But it is only unattainable in the present globalized system, in which cost-cutting is turning high-tech, First World industrial economies into low-tech Third World cheap-labor plantation economies. Only economic nationalism can spur the technological innovations necessary to create a post-scarcity economy by raising labor costs, both through immigration controls and tariff walls against cheap foreign manufactured goods.

3. Ethnonationalism & Science

So far we have established that scientific and technological progress are undermined by globalization and encouraged by nationalist economic policies and the rivalries between nations and civilizational blocs. But we need a more specific argument to establish that ethnonationalism is especially in harmony with scientific and technological progress.

My first premise is: No form of government is fully compatible with scientific and technological progress if it is founded on dogmas that are contrary to fact. For instance, the republic of Oceania might have a population of intelligent and industrious people, an excellent educational system, first rate infrastructure, and a booming economy. But if the state religion of Oceania mandates that the Earth is flat and lies at the center of the universe, Oceania is not going to take us to the stars.

My second premise is: The advocacy of racially and ethnically diverse societies—regardless of whether they have liberal or conservative regimes—is premised on the denial of political experience and the science of human biological diversity.

The history of human societies offers abundant evidence that putting multiple ethnic groups under the same political system is a recipe for otherwise avoidable ethnic tensions and conflicts. Furthermore, science indicates that the most important factors for scientific and technological advancement—intelligence and creativity—are primarily genetic, and they are not equally distributed among the races. Finally, Genetic Similarity Theory predicts that the most harmonious and happy societies will be the most genetically homogeneous, with social conflict increasing with genetic diversity.

Denying these facts is anti-scientific in two ways. First and most obviously, it is simply the refusal to look at objective facts that contradict the dogma that diversity improves society. Second, basing a society on this dogma undermines the genetic and social conditions necessary for progress and innovation, for instance by lowering the average IQ and creating greater social conflict. Other things being equal, these factors will make a society less likely to foster scientific and technological innovation.

My third premise is: Ethnonationalism is based on both political experience and the science of human biological diversity—and does not deny any other facts. Therefore, ethnonationalism is more compatible with scientific and technological progress than are racially and ethnically diverse societies—other things being equal.

Of course some research and development projects require so much money and expertise that they can only be undertaken by large countries like the United States, China, India, or Russia. Although we can predict with confidence that all of these societies would improve their research and development records if they were more racially and culturally homogeneous, even in their present states they can accomplish things that small, homogeneous ethnostates simply cannot dream of.

For instance, if a country of two million people like Slovenia were to adopt ethnonationalism, it would probably outperform a more diverse society with the same size and resources in research and development. But it would not be able to colonize Mars. However, just as small countries can defend themselves from big countries by creating alliances, small states can work together on scientific and technological projects too big to undertake on their own. But no alliance is stronger than its weakest member. Since diversity is a weakness and homogeneity is a strength, we can predict that cooperative research and development efforts among ethnostates will probably be more fruitful than those among diverse societies.

Now someone might object that one can improve upon the ethnostate by taking in only high-IQ immigrants from other races. Somehow Americans went to the Moon without importing Asians and Indians. Such people are being imported today for two reasons. First, importing foreign brains allows us to evade problems with producing our own, namely, dysgenic fertility and the collapse of American STEM education, largely due to political correctness, i.e., racial integration and the denial of biological intelligence differences. Second, the productivity gains attributed to diversity in technology are simply due to cost-cutting. But the real answer is: The internet allows whites to collaborate with the best scientists around the world. So we don’t need to live with them.

To sum up: The idea that technological utopia will go hand-in-hand with the emergence of a global homogeneous society is false. The greatest advances in technology were spurred by the rivalries of hostile political powers, and with the emergence of a unipolar world, technological development has been flagging.

The idea that technological utopia goes hand-in-hand with liberal democracy is false. Liberalism from its very inception has been opposed to the idea that there is a common good of society. Liberalism is all about empowering individuals to pursue private aims and advantages. It denies that the common good exists; or, if the common good exists, liberalism denies that it is knowable; or if the common good exists and is knowable, liberalism denies that it can be pursued by the state, but instead will be brought about by an invisible hand if we just allow private individuals to go about their business.

The only thing that can bring liberal democrats together to pursue great common aims is the threat of war. This is what sent Americans to the Moon. America’s greatest technological achievements were fostered by the government, not private enterprise, and in times of hot and cold war, not peace. Since the end of the Cold War, however, victory has defeated us. America is no longer a serious country.

The solution, though, is not to go back to war, but to junk liberalism and return to the classical idea that there is a common good that can and must be pursued by the state. A liberal democracy can only be a serious country if someone like the Russians threatens to nuke them every minute of the day. Normal men and normal societies pursue the common good, because once one is convinced something really is good, one needs no additional reason to pursue it. But if you need some extra incentives, consider the environmental devastation and civilizational collapse that await us as the fossil fuel economy continues to expand like an algae bloom to its global limits. That should concentrate the mind wonderfully.

The idea that technological utopia will go hand-in-hand with global capitalism is false. Globalization has undermined technological innovation by allowing businesses to raise profits merely by cutting costs. The greatest advances in manufacturing technology have been spurred by high labor costs, which are products of a strong labor movement, closed borders, and protectionism.

Finally, the idea that technological utopianism will go hand-in-hand with racially and ethnically diverse societies is false. This is where ethnonationalism proves its superiority. Diversity promotes social conflict and removes barriers to dysgenic breeding. The global average IQ is too low to create a technological utopia. Global race-mixing will make Europeans more like the global average. Therefore, it will extinguish all dreams of progress. Ethnonationalists, however, are actually willing to replace dysgenic reproductive trends with eugenic ones, to ensure that every future generation has more geniuses, including scientific ones. And if you need an extra incentive, consider the fact that China is pursuing eugenics while in the West it is fashionable to adopt Haitian babies. Ethnonationalism, moreover, promotes social harmony and cohesion, which make possible coordinated efforts toward common goals.

What sort of society will conquer scarcity, conquer death, and settle the cosmos? A society that practices economic nationalism to encourage automation. A homogeneous, high-IQ society with eugenic rather than dysgenic reproductive trends. A harmonious, cohesive, high-trust society that can work together on common projects. An illiberal society that is willing to mobilize its people and resources to achieve great common aims. In short, if liberal democracy and global capitalism are returning us to the mud, it is ethnonationalism that will take us to the stars.

Counter-Currents, September 17, 2018

[1] Greg Johnson, “Archaeofuturist Fiction: Frank Herbert’s Dune,” Counter-Currents, August 15, 2014.

[2] Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown, 2014).

[3] Greg Johnson, “The End of Globalization,” in Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country.

[4] Greg Johnson, “Money for Nothing,” in Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country.